LIBRARY 

OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 

Class 


CONSTRAINED 
ATTITUDES 


CONSTRAINED 
ATTITUDES 


By 
FRANK  MOORE  COLBY 

AUTHOR  OF  "IMAGINARY  OBLIGATIONS" 


NEW   YORK 

DODD,   MEAD  &   COMPANY 
1910 


Copyright,  1010 
By  DODD,  MEAD  AND  COMPANY 

Published  November,  leio 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I    CORAM    POPULO & 

II  ON  THE  BRINK  OF  POLITICS     ...  23 

III  RUSTICITY  AND  CONTEMPLATION     .      .  43 

IV  THE   HUMDRUM   OF   REVOLT      :      .      .  57 
V  THE  USUAL  THING 89 

VI  IMPATIENT      "  CULTURE  "      AND      THE 

LITERAL  MIND 123 

VII  LITERARY  CLASS  DISTINCTIONS   .      .      .159 

VIII  THE  ART  OF  DISPARAGEMENT    .      .      .  177 

IX  INTERNATIONAL   IMPRESSIONISM    '    .      .  203 

X  QUOTATION  AND  ALLUSION   ....  227 

XI  OCCASIONAL  VERSE 241 


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21G043 


CORAM    POPULO 


I 

CORAM    POPULO 

SOUND  and  able  men,  no  doubt,  and  men  whom 
the  nation  delights  to  honour,  but  what  does 
happen  to  you  as  you  grasp  the  pen  or  mount 
the  platform?  For  many  years  have  I  pon 
dered  this  strange  public  diminution  of  the 
private  man,  bursting  out  on  the  subject  now 
and  then  in  print,  and  to  this  day  I  cannot 
read  a  newspaper,  attend  an  alumni  dinner,  in 
cline  my  mind  to  thoughts  presidential  or  lead 
ing  citizens'  ideals,  without  a  sense  of  won 
der.  And  though  sheer  bald  wonder  may 
seem  to  some  to  be  of  small  advantage,  I  do 
assure  all  who,  like  me,  are  sometimes  a  little 
wearied  on  these  occasions  that  it  helps  to  pass 
the  time. 

3 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Newspapers  are  no  less  merciless  to  their 
writers  than  they  are  to  their  readers.  It  is 
a  cruel  thing,  this  system  which  effaces  com 
pletely  the  editorial  person,  good  or  bad,  and 
leaves  only  a  vague  "  we,"  meaning  the  cor 
poration,  or  the  linotype  machines,  or  the  peo 
ple,  or  some  such  bundle  of  entities,  never  any 
body  in  particular.  A  sad  personal  disaster 
behind  that  corporate  "we."  Sometimes  there 
is  the  wail  of  a  lost  soul  in  it — somebody  try 
ing  to  be  everybody  and  all  gone  to  vulgar 
fractions  in  the  process.  There  are  editors 
who  think  exclusively  in  "we's,"  even  out  of 
office  hours,  the  mind  balking  instinctively  at 
any  thought  "  unlikely  to  interest  our  read 
ers  "  or  unsupported  by  an  "  influential  por 
tion  of  the  intelligent  public."  That  is  what 
comes  of  being  a  mouthpiece  and  a  fourth  es 
tate,  and  a  bulwark,  palladium,  wholesale 
broker  in  public  opinion,  guide,  caterer,  social 
I 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

dynamometer  and  what  not.  An  editor's  soul 
will  usually  disappear  long  before  it  leaves  the 
body. 

Editorial  expression  at  present  is  so  imper 
sonal  that  nobody  seems  to  matter  in  the  least. 
A  massacre  in  Park  Row,  provided  it  did  not 
end  in  pillage,  would  make  little  difference  in 
those  excellent  editorial  pages.  Should  the 
murderers  pass  from  Franklin  Square  (wet 
with  the  blood  of  Harper's  chivalry)  to  the 
offices  of  uptown  monthly  magazines,  pausing 
only  to  burn  the  editors  of  the  two  admirable 
weeklies  which  they  would  pass  on  the  way,  the 
carnage,  though  in  a  sense  deplorable,  would 
not  seriously  affect  the  characters  of  the  be 
reaved  magazines.  A  momentary  maladjust 
ment,  perhaps,  some  black-bordered  para 
graphs  about  an  irreparable  loss,  but  soon  each 
would  be  giving  to  its  readers  precisely  what 
its  readers  were  accustomed  to  receive.  And 
5 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

but  for  those  same  black  borders  no  reader 
would  suspect  that  the  "  strong  personality 
which  left  its  impress  on  all  its  pages  "  had  re 
cently  "  passed  away."  I  would  not  bring 
back  the  times  when  editors  were  shot  or  horse 
whipped  for  what  they  wrote,  yet  I  do  miss  the 
kind  of  man  whose  absence  would  be  noticed  if 
by  chance  somebody  did  kill  him. 

Others  have  expressed  the  same  feeling  of 
loneliness  while  wandering  among  the  printed 
words  of  college  presidents.  I  remember,  how 
ever,  that  one  college  president  did  speak  out 
on  a  public  occasion  about  eleven  years  ago, 
and  it  caused  no  small  excitement.  He  ad 
vised,  I  think,  the  social  ostracism  of  wicked 
millionaires.  The  thought  itself  was  not  re 
markable.  It  was  familiar  indeed  from  sev 
eral  Bible  texts.  But  it  did  seem  a  valiant 
thought  for  a  college  president.  The  stand 
ard  of  college  presidents  is  not  that  of  other 
0 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

men;  it  is  more  nearly  that  set  by  Pericles  for 
women.  It  is  not  desired  that  they  shall  stir 
the  public  thought  or  divide  the  minds  of  citi 
zens.  The  moral  and  intellectual  caution  de 
manded  of  them  in  the  public  gaze  has  always 
been  enormous.  A  humanly  applicable  remark 
is  a  presidential  indecency.  In  contrast  to 
the  wild  turbulence  of  the  home,  where  Chris 
tian  sentiments  may  be  rudely  noised  and  the 
Ten  Commandments  flung  about  without  re 
gard  to  whom  they  injure,  the  American  citi 
zen  has  ever  turned  to  the  college  presidential 
platform  as  to  the  centre  of  repose.  No  tam 
pering  with  conscience  from  that  quarter  at  all 
events ;  no  personal  application ;  no  shock  from 
collision  with  a  mind  in  motion.  Hence  it  was 
most  natural  when  this  college  president  applied 
a  principle  of  the  Bible  to  human  affairs  that  a 
thousand  editorial  writers  should  begin  writ 
ing  passionately  at  once  and  that  many  of  us 
7 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

should  exclaim,  The  daredevil!  Privately  he 
would  have  seemed  quite  tame  and  dull;  presi 
dent!  ally  he  was  a  madcap. 

Never  but  once  have  I  been  stirred  on  an  im 
portant  college  occasion.  This  was  at  a  Com 
mencement  dinner,  where,  carried  away  by  my 
feelings,  I  almost  made  a  speech.  This  was 
the  speech  I  came  near  making: 

"  It  is  not  often,  Mr.  President,  brother 
alumni,  and  distinguished  guests,  that  I  rise 
to  appreciable  heights  of  moral  grandeur,  but 
I  do  so  now.  I  stand  before  you  to-night, 
brimming  with  the  spirit  of  your  recent  ad 
dresses.  I,  too,  have  my  generalities  and  my 
truisms,  and  it  will  do  you  no  harm  to  listen 
in  your  turn  to  my  somewhat  nasal  moral  sing 
song.  Through  a  chain  of  flowery  Junes, 
reaching  far  beyond  the  memory  of  men  now 
living,  may  be  traced  both  the  form  and  the  sub 
stance  of  your  speeches.  For  no  law  of  nature 
8 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

seems  more  sure  than  this  great  law  of  Com 
mencement  gravitation,  whereby  it  is  ruled  that 
the  heavy  bodies  of  like  "  distinguished  sons  " 
shall  fall  in  like  manner  upon  their  subjects. 
Such  is  the  force  of  tradition,  and  this  is  the 
traditon  of  June,  that  for  many  days  the  minds 
of  our  youth  shall  be  soused  in  the  cant  of  their 
elders  and  a  land  already  drugged  with  opti 
mism  shall  again  be  overdosed.  But  a  time- 
honoured  tradition,  gentlemen,  is  not  necessar 
ily  a  good  tradition,  as  we  know  from  that 
most  ancient  and  best  beloved  of  human  insti 
tutions,  the  lie.  Here  let  us  pause  to  consider 
the  peril  concealed  in  what  may  be  called  Amer 
ican  college  platform  English,  that  is  to  say, 
the  large,  loose,  general  and  roseate  language 
you  have  just  now  employed.  It  is  ambigu 
ous  ;  there  is  room  in  it,  alas !  for  wicked  things. 
Your  alma  mater  has  grown  richer;  so  has  the 
lie.  She  has  a  larger  entering  class  than  in 

9 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

any  past  year  of  her  history;  so  has  the  lie. 
She  has  added  several  new  courses,  each  with 
an  endowed  professorship;  so  has  that  older 
but  no  less  progressive  institution,  the  lie — * 
that  incomparable  alma  mater  by  your  own 
tests  of  alma-maternity,  for  are  not  her  alumni 
the  most  numerous,  the  most  glorious  and  the 
most  loyal  of  them  all?  For  the  tests  are  still 
only  success  and  numbers.  Still  that  doxol- 
ogy  of  success  and  numbers.  Still  after  fifty 
Junes  the  young  man  "  going  forth  into  the 
world"  may  learn  from  his  oratorical  elders 
only  the  piety  of  success  and  the  wisdom  of 
numbers.  The  "  plain  people  "  still  perceive 
that  your  Commencement  exhortation  will,  after 
drawing  off  the  water,  yield  only  that.  I  rise 
for  one  moment  on  the  backbone  of  this  repub 
lic  to  inquire,  Is  this  well?" 

These  ringing  words  were  not  spoken  and 
perhaps  it  is  as  well  that  they  were  not,  for  the 
10 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

mysteries  of  college  eloquence  are  not  for  me 
to  solve. 

But  the  charms  wrought  by  educators  on 
other  educators  and  on  those  whom  they  have 
educated  are  after  all  not  nearly  so  strange  as 
the  magic  words  of  Chief  Executives.  What 
spells  were  once  cast,  for  example,  by  Presi 
dential  language  such  as  this :  "  Purity  in  poli 
tics  is  laudable,  and  if  we  would  be  good  citi 
zens  we  must  insist  on  good  laws,  and  what 
this  country  needs  is  manly  men  (equally,  of 
course,  womanly  women,  for  woman  is  very  im 
portant;  so  is  the  home),  and  if  we  are  poor, 
let  us  not  envy  the  rich,  and  if  we  are  rich  let 
us  not  despise  the  poor,  for  a  man's  a  man  for 
a'  that,  and  our  lives  should  be  both  strenuous 
and  simple,  and  let  us  take  for  our  constant 
example  the  youth  who  bore  through  snow  and 
ice  the  banner  with  the  strange  device,  U-pi- 
dee,  i-da."  Where  are  these  wildfolk,  clad  in 
11 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

goatskins,  and  possibly  anthropophagous  in 
taste,  whom  the  mere  remark  that  it  is  better 
to  be  good  than  bad  so  strangely  moves?  I 
have  never  met  a  single  person  who  owned  to 
any  special  liking  for  the  thing,  although  my 
acquaintance  includes  some  of  the  simplest 
types  of  human  life  as  yet  known  to  science. 
No  matter  how  plain  and  honest  our  fellow- 
citizen  may  be,  he  always  appears  somewhat 
blase,  and  passes  it  on  to  some  one  else  whom 
he  believes  to  be  still  plainer. 

It  was  expected  of  Presidents,  ex-Presidents 
and  the  like  that  they  would  rise  in  public  at 
short  intervals  and  plead  for  the  home.  It 
seemed  probable  that  every  future  President 
would  find  that  a  fixed  part  of  his  duties  as 
chief  magistrate  was  the  almost  incessant  cham 
pionship  of  motherhood.  Official  praises  of  the 
home  accompanied  by  bugle  calls  to  domesticity 
were  felt  to  be  the  country's  daily  need.  That 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

is  why  one  ex-President  (himself  a  superb'  fam 
ily  man  and  every  inch  a  husband)  paused  so 
seldom  in  his  advocacy  of  the  home.  That  is 
why  another  ex-President,  by  no  means  an  emo 
tional  person,  once  came  forward  to  defend  the 
home,  braving  the  slings  of  cankered  club 
women.  Soon  or  late  every  leading  citizen  ad 
dressed  himself  in  public  (a  propos  of  nothing 
in  particular)  to  the  absorbing  questions,  How 
is  Woman  and  How  is  the  Home?  Domestic 
as  we  were  already — doing  our  very  best,  one 
might  fairly  say — we  were  stampeded  every 
other  day  by  vague  but  excited  exhortation  to 
rally  round  the  home.  Hearing  for  the  thou 
sandth  time  that  they  ought  to  stay  at  home 
and  rear  good  citizens,  a  number  of  American 
club-women  retorted  somewhat  tartly  to  this 
advice.  There  is,  I  have  noticed,  a  certain 
acerbity  in  the  writings  of  club-women,  imply 
ing  that  the  Cause,  though  in  the  main  benevo- 
13 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

lent,  has  its  forbidding  side.  One  of  them,  re 
ferring  to  the  idle  habits  of  Presidents,  de 
clared  that  she  "  had  heard  of  families  that 
starved  because  the  fathers  went  fishing  all  the 
time."  Another  said,  "  It  is  the  plea  of  a  man 
who  speaks  from  a  purely  selfish  standpoint,  as 
though  he  were  afraid  his  wife  might  become  a 
club-woman."  A  third  gave  warning  that  the 
sight  "  of  the  President  of  the  United  States 
galloping  over  the  country  urging  women  to 
bear  more  children  "  would  "  engender  the  spirit 
of  rebellion  in  the  minds  of  many  women." 

While  I  do  not  sympathise  with  the  vindic 
tive  spirit  of  these  rejoinders,  I  believe  that  the 
anxieties  of  editors  and  statesmen  on  this  sub 
ject  are  excessive;  that  the  most  domestic  peo 
ple  under  the  sun  are  entitled  to  their  moments 
of  self-confidence ;  that  for  days  at  a  time  Wo 
man  is  safe  and  the  home  unshaken;  that  even 
in  the  absence  of  explicit  advice,  children  would 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

be  born  and  raised,  and  that  meals  are  cooked 
even  in  the  pauses  of  oratory.  And  in  not  flying 
into  print  to  the  defence  of  the  home,  let  me 
not  for  one  moment  be  suspected  of  laxity.  By 
Heaven !  I  should  as  soon  think  of  hauling 
down  Old  Glory  as  of  removing  from  above  my 
fireplace  that  cardboard  motto,  "God  Bless 
Our  Home,"  stitched  in  worsted.  I  am  opposed 
to  cannibalism,  polygamy,  human  sacrifice,  the 
areois,  polyandry,  the  suttee,  the  exposure  of 
infants  on  Mount  Taygetus,  anarchy  and  feud 
alism.  Civilisation  has  my  endorsement,  and 
the  family  tie  in  its  hour  of  need  may  count 
on  me  for  a  word  of  encouragement.  Silence 
on  these  themes  now  is  no  sign  of  heresy,  but 
proof,  rather,  of  a  deep  conviction  that  cer 
tain  things  may  be  taken  for  granted  even 
among  the  people  at  large.  The  very  plain 
est  of  the  plain  people  are  not  without  a  cer 
tain  sense  of  proportion,  nor  do  they  lack  for 
15 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

truisms  in  their  daily  life.  They  know  that 
the  kitchen  will  subsist  though  undefended  by 
a  leading  citizen,  and  that  the  nursery  is  in  a 
fair  way  to  hold  its  own.  They  know  that  if 
the  home  has  its  renegades  it  has  also  its  vic 
tims,  and  they  can  reckon  up  more  mere  wives 
and  utter  husbands  than  they  can  count  va 
grants  from  the  marriage  bond.  They  have 
seen  the  family  so  absolutely  a  unit  that  each 
member  was  socially  an  abject  fraction,  and 
many  a  homelike  city  in  this  country  has  fur 
nished  a  case  in  point ;  and  if  men  have  fallen 
from  fatherhood,  they  can  point  to  many  a 
putative  citizen  who  is  too  much  of  a  father 
for  his  country's  good,  and  to  pairs  linked  to 
gether  in  monosyllabic  intimacy  who  were,  if 
anything,  too  much  encouraged  by  this  con 
stant  Presidential  and  editorial  singing  of 
Home,  Sweet  Home.  And  so  considering  the 
number  and  the  kind  of  influences  that  home 
16 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ties  do  resist,  they  openly  defy  the  most  leo 
nine  of  club-women  to  do  her  worst. 

And  lest  it  appear  that  I  have  nothing  to 
complain  of  but  a  surfeit  from  these  Presi 
dential  champions  of  the  home,  let  me  add  a 
political  argument,  which  I  have  drawn  from 
a  recent  book  on  English  manners.  It  is  writ 
ten  by  an  American  power-worshipper,  whose 
admiration  of  the  British  widens  with  the 
square  miles  of  their  empire  on  the  map.  Eng 
land,  he  says,  has  of  late  years  been  ruled  by 
a  "  succession  of  mighty  men,"  and  if  put  to 
it  he  would  no  doubt  explain  that  they  were 
mighty  because  they  ruled  England.  And  this 
brings  him  to  an  aspect  of  England  to  which 
he  frequently  recurs,  as  well  he  may,  for  it  is 
indeed  charming.  It  is  the  aspect  of  Eng 
land  as  the  happy  hunting-ground  of  hus 
bands,  the  land  where  on  moderate  incomes  the 
men  have  valets  and  the  women  hardly  any 
17 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

clothes.  For  the  great  capacity  to  rule,  to 
conquer  and  to  dolonise  may,  he  thinks,  be 
traced  directly  to  the  male  ascendancy  in  the 
English  home.  Groomed,  well-fed,  exercised, 
never  thwarted,  and  with  the  wife  always  in 
her  proper  place,  the  English  husband  is,  like 
the  fire  engine  horse,  always  in  the  pink  of  con 
dition,  and  ready  at  an  instant's  moral  alarm 
to  rush  forth  to  the  most  distant  part  of  the 
world  and  kill  a  coloured  man.  This  explains 
the  British  empire,  and,  per  contra,  I  may  add, 
it  explains  the  imperial  shortcomings  of  the 
United  States,  for  here  having  once  provided 
for  the  wife  in  that  station  of  life  to  which  it 
has  pleased  her  to  call  him,  and  having  served 
without  offence  as  handy  man  about  the  house, 
the  American  husband  has  not  the  time  left, 
still  less  the  spirit,  to  be  off  shooting  Mata- 
beles.  Thus  the  question  of  empire  is  fought 
out  in  the  home,  and  you  often  meet  a  hus- 
18 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

band,  now  utterly  domesticated,  whose  abilities 
might,  if  his  wife  would  only  set  them  loose, 
make  him  a  colonial  governor.  We  have  the 
manhood,  could  it  but  be  disengaged. 

However,  these  larger  cares  are  not  for  me 
but  only  for  opinion-moulders,  world-work 
ers,  world-pushers,  and  their  kind.  Some  say 
the  nation  profits  from  their  language,  even 
though  no  single  person  does,  which  is  one  of 
the  mysteries  of  political  arithmetic.  Others 
complain  that,  like  swearing,  it  takes  the  mean 
ing  out  of  words,  or  inflates  the  moral  cur 
rency,  or  adds  a  touch  of  impotence  to  old 
familiar  truths.  Nothing,  they  say,  makes 
concrete  sinners  feel  so  safe  and  sleepy  as  the 
distant  rumble  of  the  Golden  Rule.  The  for 
eigner  in  his  crude  way  calls  it  hypocrisy.  To 
what  extent  it  has  helped  to  fill  the  jails  or  the 
high  places  in  this  country  may  some  day  be 
determined  by  a  patient  sociologist.  But  to 
19 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

the  echo-beaten  mind  of  a  casual  reader  it  is 
interesting  rather  as  one  of  the  numerous  demo 
cratic  liturgies,  pen-habits,  thought-saving  de 
vices  or  mental  petrifactions  which  make  so 
many  public  Americans  seem  allegorical.  After 
all,  except  in  public,  there  are  really  no  such 
men. 


ON    THE     BRINK    OF    POLITICS 


II 

ON    THE     BRINK     OF     POLITICS 

SOME  time  ago  I  read  a  book  of  an  evolution 
ary  cast  on  the  irrationality  of  politics,  in 
which  the  writer  devoted  much  time  and  en 
ergy  to  proving  that  political  opinions  were 
formed  generally  in  the  dim  twilight  of  the 
human  mind. 

He  complained  that  the  student  of  politics 
spent  his  time  in  analysing  human  institutions 
and  neglected  the  analysis  of  man.  He  said  we 
ought  to  know  at  least  as  much  about  man  as 
may  be  learned  from  a  modern  text-book  on 
psychology.  He  himself  had  entered  politics 
by  way  of  biology  and  psychology,  passing" 
thence  directly  into  laboratory  work  as  a  Mem 
ber  of  the  British  Parliament.  With  admirable 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

evolutionary  modesty  he  repressed  any  political 
opinions  of  his  own,  noting  merely  the  effect 
of  party  cries  and  iterated  doctrines  on  other 
members  of  his  species.  He  delighted  in  the 
relative  view  of  things.  He  liked  to  trace  a 
political  emotion  back  through  the  savages  to 
some  fossil  horse. 

He  usually  stopped  with  these  statements 
of  kinship,  leaving  it  to  us  to  make  the  applica 
tion.  Occasionally,  however,  he  did  offer  a 
practical  suggestion.  There  was,  for  example, 
the  common  bond  between  cats  and  business 
men,  between  property-owners  and  squirrels, 
magpies  and  dogs.  He  desired  some  econom 
ist  to  write  a  treatise  on  the  question,  Would 
the  property  instinct  "  die  away  if  not  in 
dulged"? 

But  as  a  rule  he  did  not  go  beyond  the  proof 
of  ancestry,  for  he  was  one  of  those  tantalis 
ing  social  evolutionary  persons  whose  thoughts 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

end  so  completely  in  zoological  circles  that  you 
cannot  tell  whether  they  write  for  the  enlight 
enment  of  men  or  by  way  of  courtesy  to  the 
lower  animals.  When  he  saw  a  politician,  he 
immediately  became  absorbed  in  calculating  the 
degree  of  moral  credit  due  to  angle-worms. 

The  danger  of  this  social-evolutionary  habit 
is  that  one's  whole  life  may  slip  away  in  the 
making  of  zoological  comparisons,  allowing  no 
time  for  reflecting  on  what  they  mean. 
Brought  up  as  we  have  been  in  the  evolutional 
tradition  we  are  too  apt  already  to  be  en 
grossed  with  unfruitful  family  resemblances,  as 
between  housewives  and  hens,  caddis-worms  and 
novelists,  dogs  and  savings-bank  depositors.  I 
myself  might  easily  write  a  chapter  on  the 
Functions  of  Polite  Human  Conversation  That 
Were  Once  Performed  by  Tails.  I  should  show 
how  men  were  obliged  to  say  Good-morning, 
because  they  found  they  had  nothing  left  to 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

wag  it  with,  and  how  a  great  many  social  feel 
ings  once  expressed  without  noise  but  with  per 
fect  accuracy  by  the  tail  were  later  driven  to 
an  oral  outlet.  Spoken  greetings  were  not 
needed  so  long  as  there  were  tails.  A  tail  de 
clared 'that  you  were  glad  you  could  come; 
tails  replied  that  your  hosts  were  glad  to  see 
you.  The  time  of  day  in  that  early  period 
was  always  and  effectively  passed  with  the  tail. 
Tails  extended  the  early  courtesies,  hospital 
ities  and  good  cheer,  waved  doubtful  assent  or 
cordial  approval,  differentiated  the  welcome  of 
a  friend  from  that  of  a  bare  acquaintance,  suf 
ficed  in  short  for  all  the  simple  social  amenities 
now  expressed  in  forms  of  speech. 

I  should  dissent  from  the  scholarly  Unso- 
weiter's  well-known  view  that  the  need  of  artic 
ulate  social  sounds  for  the  expression  of  the 
hitherto-tail-uttered  emotions  accelerated  the 
development  of  primitive  speech-forms.  I  should 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

hold  rather  with  the  learned  Zumbeispiel's  more 
recent  studies  in  "  Tail  Rhythms  and  Animal 
Benignity  "  that  by  thrusting  upon  the  lim 
ited  potentialities  of  primitive  tongues  the  once- 
adequately-tail-performed  social  duties,  the  loss 
of  the  tail  may  well  have  retarded  the  develop 
ment  of  more  variegated  idioms.  I  should 
agree  with  him  that  even  in  the  highest  known 
forms  of  modern  society  speech  is  burdened 
with  social  sentiments  which  are  not  only  per 
fectly  tail-utterable  but  could,  indeed,  be  bet 
ter  and  less  laboriously  rendered  on  that  sim 
pler  and  more  responsive  instrument.  I  should 
point  to  the  misconstruction  of  social  silence, 
the  fear  of  the  pause,  the  social  dependence 
on  audible  signs  of  animation,  and  the  unjust 
application  of  the  stigma  "  grumpy  "  to  really 
friendly  persons  who  lack,  for  the  moment, 
speech,  but  who  with  tails  would,  no  doubt,  in 
voluntarily  express  the  warmest  social  feelings. 
27 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

And  I  should  applaud  heartily  Zumbeispiel's 
conclusion  that  it  is  far  too  soon,  perhaps  by 
one  and  one-quarter  million  years,  for  civilised 
man  to  regard  the  loss  of  his  earlier  and  more 
automatic  social  indicator  with  any  other  feel 
ing  than  regret.  In  an  appendix  I  should  re 
produce  in  a  notation  of  measured  tail-beats 
(based  on  duration  and  intensity  of  vibration) 
many  entire  conversations  overheard  at  my 
club.  I  could,  as  I  say,  easily  write  such  a 
chapter.  I  lack  only  a  knowledge  of  biology  to 
make  myself  well-nigh  intolerable.  But  I  shall 
never  write  it  for  a  reason  that  seldom  deters 
any  modern  social  evolutionist — the  reason 
that  it  seems  a  rather  silly  thing  to  do. 
Besides,  I  have  little  doubt  that  it  has  been 
already  written. 

But  to  return  to  the  irrationality  of  politics. 
My  writer  seemed  to  think  that  he  was  alone 
in  regarding  politics  as  irrational.     Again  and 
28 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

again  he  would  attack  the  "  assumption  so 
closely  interwoven  with  our  habits  of  political 
and  economic  thought  that  men  always  act  on 
a  reasoned  opinion  as  to  their  interests."  This 
seemed  to  me  an  assumption  that  fell  down  al 
most  as  soon  as  it  was  stated. 

We  do  not  in  our  private  capacities  assume 
that  "men  always  act  on  a  reasoned  opinion 
as  to  their  interests  "  when  they  vote  any  more 
than  when  they  marry  or  when  they  dance. 
Mad  as  the  world  is  we  are  spared  that  final, 
mind-closing  illusion  that  it  is  sane.  Surely 
there  is  a  deep  enough  faith  in  the  irrationality 
of  our  current  politics.  Even  though  we 
shrink  from  the  horrid  disclosures  of  self-ex 
amination  there  is  always  a  friend  to  examine 
Who  has  not  gazed  giddily  at  the  irrational 
ity  of  a  friend's  politics?  But  the  argument 
was  perhaps  addressed  not  to  men  in  their 
private  capacities,  but  to  that  far  lower  order 
29 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

of  beings,  men  about  to  appear  in  public,  men 
on  the  point  of  mounting  platforms,  getting 
ready  to  write  leading  articles,  planning  treat 
ises  on  social  science.  For  that  portion  of  a 
man  which  is  ready  for  publication  or  may  be 
found  at  any  time  in  a  political  speech  such 
language  may  have  a  special  use — if  only  as 
a  reminder  that  there  is  more  of  him. 

I  doubt  if  there  is  any  such  widespread  il 
lusion  in  private  life  as  to  the  rationality  of 
politics.  Publicly  we  express  leadership  in 
terms  of  the  leader's  ability ;  privately  we  think 
it  in  terms  of  the  dulness  of  the  led.  No  one 
needs  proof  that  men  rise  in  politics  not  be 
cause  they  are  weighty  but  because  they  are 
light ;  and  the  forlorn  human  tatters  to  be  seen 
at  any  time  floating  even  in  light  political 
breezes  are  the  subject  of  common  remark. 
When  the  strong  wind  of  free  silver  bore  up 
ward  the  expanding  form  of  a  certain  Presi- 
SO 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

dential  candidate,  we  may  Have  hailed  in  public 
the  rise  of  a  statesman,  but  we  were  thinking  in 
private  that  almost  anything  might  fly.  Nobody 
ever  looks  inside  a  Senator  to  see  what  makes 
him  go;  it  is  explained  by  Indiana's  utter  care 
lessness  or  Rhode  Island's  absence  of  mind.  One 
does  not  ask  his  boots  how  they  climbed  upon 
the  mantel-piece;  one  knows  in  heedless  times 
that  things  get  out  of  place.  A  Senator  is 
merely  a  sign  of  other  people's  inattention.  We 
may  be  a  little  careless  in  our  language,  but  in 
private  life  we  no  more  believe  in  the  ration 
ality  of  politics  than  in  the  rationality  of  suc 
cess.  Prodigious  financial  intellects  are  not 
much  admired  privately.  They  are,  indeed,  ex 
ceedingly  uninteresting.  It  is  only  a  maga 
zine  writer  who  can  see  the  signs  of  power  in 
that  financially  successful  face.  In  private  we 
merely  see  that  it  looks  a  good  deal  like  a  wal 
rus,  and  from  what  we  know  about  the  man 
81 


CONSTRAINED     'ATTITUDES 

himself  we  have  no  reason  to  think  that,  apart 
from  financial  emotions,  he  did  not  feel  like 
one — one  corner  of  the  mind  spidery,  organis 
ing,  grasping  detail,  all  the  rest  pure  walrus. 
In  public  we  say  the  race  is  to  the  strongest; 
in  private  we  know  that  a  lopsided  man  runs 
the  fastest  along  the  little  side-hills  of  success. 
Mothers  still  punish  their  little  boys  for  the 
winning  ways  of  the  rising  statesman,  and  there 
is  seldom  rejoicing  in  any  home  when  a  decent 
all-round  baby  begins  to  decay  into  something 
like  a  Harriman.  In  private  life  these  re 
marks  of  mine  are  platitudes ;  in  public  think 
ing  they  are  really  quite  profound.  Approach 
them  by  way  of  "  social  psychology  "  and  you 
will  feel  that  you  have  penetrated  far. 

Nor  have  we  in  private  life  any  such  faith 
in  the  rationality  of  political  reformers,  as 
might  be  presumed  from  our  magazines.  For 
some  years  past  we  have  had  a  chance  to  ob- 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

serve  closely  an  unusual  number  and  variety 
of  reformers.  It  has  been  a  period,  some  say, 
of  moral  awakening,  though  as  I  look  back 
upon  it,  it  seems  rather  a  period  of  journalis 
tic  fits  and  starts.  For  it  was  the  era  of  those 
strange  magazine  early  birds,  known  as  "  muck- 
rakers."  Many  could  understand  why  a  muck- 
raker  chose  his  subject,  but  few  could  explain 
why  he  let  it  drop. 

Apart  from  any  moral  consideration,  the  sud 
den  cessation  of  many  of  those  interesting  mag 
azine  exposures  was,  I  think,  a  literary  injus 
tice.  A  picaresque  romance  of  gangs  and 
bosses  would  run  through  three  numbers  of  a 
magazine,  then  stop  as  suddenly  as  a  trust 
prosecution.  I  acquired  at  the  time  quite  a 
taste  for  corrupt  aldermen,  but  the  means  of 
gratifying  it  were  soon  abruptly  denied.  What 
ever  became  of  those  interesting  rascals?  And 
how  fared  it  with  St.  George  and  the  Dragon 
33 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

— and  that  affair  between  Ormuzd  and  Ahri- 
man  (pronounced  in  the  magazines  Harriman), 
how  did  it  turn  out?  Often  the  best  things 
happened  after  the  serial  had  ceased.  That 
much  I  could  gather  from  newspaper  de 
spatches  (tantalising  bits,  no  real  story),  but 
search  as  I  would  I  could  find  no  magazine 
narrator  resuming  the  thread  of  his  plot.  The 
final  "  graft "  trial  in  San  Francisco  had,  for 
example,  according  to  the  newspapers,  a  court 
record  of  four  million  words, — a  mine  of  "  vital 
human  interest,"  moral  throbs  and  devilry,  bet 
ter  material  than  went  to  the  making  of  the 
whole  San  Francisco  corruption  magazine  se 
ries  down  to  the  day  it  stopped.  Assassina 
tion,  suicide,  perjuries  and  plots,  theft  of  doc 
uments,  bribing  and  out-bribing,  corruption 
never  so  thick,  lying  never  more  ample — what 
more  could  one  wish?  Yet  not  one  good  con 
secutive  magazine  story  of  it  during  the  year — 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

San  Francisco's  best  year  for  literary  purposes. 
Observe  that  this  criticism  is  merely  literary. 
Let  others  take  the  civic  measure  of  those  mag 
azine  reformers,  early  moral  minute-men,  muck- 
rakers,  demi-socialists,  whatever  they  were 
called.  I  dare  say  it  may  have  been  reform, 
for  all  it  looks  now  so  much  like  flirtation.  I 
blame  them  here  only  as  traitors  to  the  com 
mon  curiosity,  who  from  having  overdone  many 
beginnings  cheated  us  out  of  some  very  inter 
esting  consequences. 

And  what  befell  the  reformers  themselves? 
Apparently  the  republic  has  forgotten  even  the 
names  of  many  muckrakers,  quite  famous  in 
their  time.  No  one  seems  to  know  what  they 
have  been  doing  since.  Swallowed  up  some 
where  in  popular  magazinedom,  deeply  ab 
sorbed  doubtless,  but  in  what  diverse  things? 
It  is  an  idle  speculation,  but  I  have  often  tried 
to  figure  to  myself  what  some  typical  muck- 
35 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

raker  has  probably  been  up  to  since  "graft" 
became  obsolete  for  magazine  uses,  though 
lively  enough  elsewhere.  I  can  guess  him  only 
from  his  magazine's  contents.  Perhaps  he  was 
caught  first  in  that  timely  balloon  ascension. 
Perhaps  he  took  a  turn  next  with  the  negro 
problem  or  with  Abraham  Lincoln  when  those 
two  topics  plunged  again  into  the  "public 
eye."  Perhaps  the  Emmanuel  Movement  drew 
him.  Call  anything  a  Movement  and  he  would 
be  likely  to  try  and  run  with  it  a  little  way. 
He  must  have  made  several  dabs  at  Prohibition 
as  it  fell  in  and  out  of  the  "  public  eye."  The 
accident  to  the  "public  eye"  occurs,  by  the 
way,  very  systematically  in  popular  magazine 
journalism  and  must  not  be  confounded  with 
the  burning  of  questions.  A  "  burning  ques 
tion  "  may  not  appear  for  two  or  three  num 
bers,  and  it  seldom  burns  for  more  than  four; 
whereas  the  "  public  eye  "  is  continuously  get- 
36 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ting  people  and  things  in  it,  being  an  aston 
ishingly  open  feature  that  never  blinks  for  man 
or  insect.  Probably  most  muckrakers  went 
straight  into  public  eye  work,  taking  things 
just  as  they  came — aeroplanes,  poets'  birth 
days,  the  direct  primary,  benzoate  of  soda, 
woman's  suffrage,  war  on  house  flies — happy  in 
a  variety  that  conformed  to  a  natural  coquetry 
of  intellect.  A  few  deeper  natures  preferred  no 
doubt  the  slower  round  of  the  "burning  ques 
tion  " — Is  New  York  sufficiently  religious  ? — 
How  about  a  college  education?  Even  this 
seems  giddy  enough.  Fancy  a  life  that  hangs 
precariously  on  the  first  blushes  of  "  burning 
questions,"  if  I  may  mix  a  few  figures  of 
speech.  Think  of  the  danger  of  becoming  in 
terested,  of  carrying  last  year's  enthusiasm 
over  into  this,  of  the  hair-breadth  escapes  from 
last  month's  deepest  convictions.  There  is  al 
ways  the  risk  that  axinan  may  retain  some  ra- 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

tional  continuity  of  interest,  utterly  out  of 
place  in  a  popular  magazine,  likely,  indeed,  to 
wreck  it.  An  ex-muckraker  must  have  success 
fully  dropped  at  least  fifty  subjects  within  two 
years  just  in  the  nick  of  time  to  save  their  be 
coming  food  for  reflection.  As  I  said  before,  I 
do  not  know  the  life,  but  am  merely  guessing  at 
it  from  the  magazines.  It  seems  a  hazardous 
sort  of  intellectual  wild-life  not  without  a  cu 
rious  interest.  It  is  odd  that  no  one  should 
have  thought  of  tracing  the  course  of  some 
muckraker  since  he  disappeared. 

But  cock-crow  journalism  has  at  least  a 
cheerful  meaning  to  those  who  practise  it,  en 
dowed,  as  they  doubtless  are,  with  temperaments 
of  tough  fibre  and  good  spring,  dominating 
routine,  disguising  perfunctoriness,  looking 
forward  to  new  subjects  as  to  meals,  sure  of  an 
appetite.  Nor  can  it  be  denied  that  a  buoyant 
enough  mind  may  experience  all  the  excitements 
of  epoch-making,  even  when  merely  taking 
38 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

notes  on  the  accouchement  of  the  present  mo 
ment.  [And  if  there  is  no  great  zest  for  the 
present  subject  there  is  always  the  joy  of  es 
caping  the  one  before,  and  above  all  there  is 
the  sense  of  motion,  of  new  births,  new  dawns, 
new  movements,  signs  of  the  times,  moral  awak 
enings,  sentimental  earthquakes,  and  the  gen 
eral  mountainous  parturition  of  the  mouse-like 
little  particular.  Not  such  a  bad  life  after  all 
— perhaps  as  good  as  journalism  has  to  offer 
— and  if  one  could  by  wishing  transform  him 
self  into  a  successful  writer  he  might  do  worse 
than  change  places  with  one  of  these  same 
volatile  reformers,  punctual  seers  and  quick 
forget ters,  who  can  always  have  an  early  morn 
ing  feeling,  no  matter  what  the  time  of  day — 
glad  hearts  bursting  with  important  moral 
announcements,  like  canary-birds  whose  song 
hails  with  an  equal  rapture  the  breaking  of 
day  and  the  running  of  the  sewing-machine. 


RUSTICITY    AND    CONTEMPLATION 


in 

RUSTICITY    AND    CONTEMPLATION 

SENSITIVE  folk,  who  shudder  at  the  bustling 
"modern  spirit,"  majorities,  millionaires,  mo 
tor  cars,  popular  fiction,  Sunday  newspapers, 
imperialism,  giant  strides,  nervous  tension,  ma 
chinery  and  like  matters,  who  think  the  love  of 
beauty  dead  or  dying,  art  on  the  wane,  "  Cul 
ture  "  a  forlorn  hope,  and  taste  commercially 
tainted,  might  take  heart  if  they  would  look 
about  and  count  the  equally  sensitive  noses. 
They  are  a  minority,  to  be  sure,  but  a  lusty 
one  and  exceedingly  voluble.  Consider  the 
journalism  of  gentle  contemplation.  I  have 
lately  read  more  tender  little  open-air  reveries, 
praises  of  Nature,  praises  of  the  soul,  primrose 
reflections,  shy  musings,  upland  dreams  than  I 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

could  mention,  some  of  them  in  books,  some  in 
the  magazines,  but  many  of  them  in  the  news 
papers,  even  the  coarse,  pragmatical,  money- 
minded  newspapers.  The  journalism  of  gentle 
contemplation  has  become  a  profession  in  it 
self.  Consider  the  remarkable  increase  and 
multiplication  of  good  little  Professor  Wood- 
side  alone.  Add  to  the  books  written  by  Pro 
fessor  Woodside  the  books  that  might  as  well 
have  been  written  by  Professor  Woodside;  add 
to  these  the  woodnotes  and  general  reflections 
of  all  the  periodicals,  especially  the  quiet 
thoughts  of  British  periodicals  about  friend 
ship,  eventide,  charity,  an  old  churchyard, 
downs,  lanes,  hedgerows,  wild  violets,  choughs, 
rooks,  rabbits,  or  a  sunset — and  the  murmurs 
of  quiet  meditation  will  swell  to  something  of 
a  roar.  For  literary  seclusion  is  wonderfully 
prolific  and  Nature  has,  these  many  years,  been 
almost  mobbed  for  rustic  notes.  They  are 
44 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

formidable  in  numbers  and  of  an  amazing  una 
nimity,  these  fugitives  from  vulgar  modern 
majorities. 

There  are  hundreds  of  them  writing  as  one 
man,  and  they  are  read  by  hundreds  of  thou 
sands — very  naturally,  too,  f or  the  subj  ects  are 
altogether  amiable  and  the  writers'  intentions 
good,  and  we  are  glad  in  this  kind  of  writing 
to  take  the  will  for  the  deed,  thankful  even  for 
the  bare  names  of  pleasant  things.  They  alle 
viate  the  advertisements,  financial  articles, 
leading  articles,  and  book  reviews.  "Brook 
trout "  sounds  grateful  after  "  rate  of  ex 
change  "  or  "  brokerage,"  and  it  is  pleasant  to 
turn  from  the  man  who  has  unmasked  the  de 
signs  of  Germany  in  Mumbojumboland  to  the 
man  who  has  removed  four  large  stones  from 
a  hill-top  and  uncovered  a  stormy  petrel  sit 
ting  on  her  eggs.  But  the  stormy  petrel  man 
is  far  prouder  than  his  brother  of  Mumbojum- 
45 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

boland.  His  "  feeling  for  Nature  "  does  not 
extend  to  that  hard-worked  person  in  the  next 
column,  who  is  plainly  just  as  much  a  fellow- 
creature  as  a  coot  and  ought  to  be  as  interest 
ing  as  a  moor-hen,  and  who  if  turned  loose  with 
a  note-book  might  do  as  well  by  "  Nature's 
secrets  "  as  he  does  by  those  of  the  Great  Pow 
ers — know  when  a  thing  is  bosky  and  when  a 
thing  is  lush,  know  the  wonderful  hour  that  is 
neither  night  nor  day,  and  the  tang  of  salt  air, 
and  the  skirl  of  the  haw-bird,  and  the  booming 
note  of  the  dugong,  and  where  the  bumbleber- 
ries  cluster  thickest  and  the  wild  pomatum 
blooms — do  as  well  by  outdoors,  in  short,  as 
the  haughtiest  of  Nature's  tuft-hunters.  That 
is  the  vice  of  rustic  and  contemplative  jour 
nalism — arrogance  and  the  proud  sense  of 
personal  rarity. 

"  The  only  unity  of  a  Diary,"  said  one  of 
them  in  the  Dedication  of  his  Diary  of  Tender 
46 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Thoughts,  "is  the  personality  of  the  Diarist." 
It  was  not  in  the  least  a  diary;  nor  had  it  any 
personal  mark  upon  it.  It  was  a  volume  of 
trim  little  papers  about  many  charming  and 
beautiful  objects,  pictures,  books,  the  nightin 
gale,  daffodils,  the  sea,  and  clouds — essays  in 
gentle  emotion  and  appreciative  observation 
which  appeared  in  British  newspapers  and  mag 
azines.  It  is  a  gentleman-like  and  desirable 
form  of  professional  activity,  but  as  devoid  of 
"  personality "  as  any  other  kind  of  journal 
ism — for  example,  the  market  quotations. 
Professor  Woodside,  also,  insists  firmly  on  a 
"  personality,"  convinced  that  a  certain  smooth, 
sweet,  even  fluency  in  praise  of  quietude,  flow 
ers,  brooks,  the  countryside,  beauty,  art,  the 
ways  of  God,  and  resignation,  is  all  his  own. 
Yet  no  man  ever  stayed  so  long  alike  as  Pro 
fessor  Woodside's  manner.  Each  one  of  these 
many  writers  seems  to  think  that  when  he  has 
47, 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

achieved  a  monotone  he  has  expressed  a  "per 
sonality."  An  odd  illusion,  when  one  thinks 
how  rarely  "  personality "  appears  in  print. 
There  is  "  personality,"  I  suppose,  in  the  de 
scriptive  writing  of  Meredith  and  Hardy,  but 
that  is  literature.  In  literature  men  have  the 
luck  to  be  born  singly;  in  journalism  they  are 
sometimes  born  in  litters,  but  more  generally 
are  incubated  in  very  large  broods.  The  jour 
nalists  of  gentle  contemplation  are  valued  for 
their  vocabulary  alone.  Personally  they  are 
undistinguishable. 

I  wonder  if  appropriate  terms  arranged  in 
lists  as  in  the  spelling-books  and  followed  by 
some  single  consolatory  sentence  would  not 
serve  almost  as  well.  Thus — 

Moor  Tender  green 

Heather  A  glint 

Bracken  A  shimmer 

Gorse  Bathed  in  sunlight 

Curlew  Thrush  singing 

48 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Lark  Lonely- 

Lazy  clouds  Freshening  breeze 

Purple  shadows  Lengthening  shadows 

Golden  haze  One  by  one  the  stars 

Distant   chimes  Long-drawn  sigh 

A  hush  Nature   breathing 

A  cow  Vault  of  heaven 

And  as  I  made  my  way  slowly  homeward  through 
the  deepening  gloom,  it  seemed  as  if  some  vast  and 
mysterious  but  friendly  power  had  strewn  the  soft, 
dark  mantle  of  forgiveness  over  the  world  of  strug 
gling  men  and  were  whispering  tenderly  of  peace. 

I  have  found  far  more  loyal  Nature-lovers 
in  the  suburbs  than  in  these  literary  wilds,  and 
I  know  of  a  better  sort  of  rustic  journalism. 
I  once  read,  for  example,  an  excellent  maga 
zine  called  Suburban  Days,  which  addressed 
itself  exclusively  to  the  class  known  as  "  com 
muters,"  that  is  to  say,  men  of  the  monthly 
ticket,  same  train  morning  and  night,  in 
domitable,  amphibious,  never  a  night  in  town. 
It  was  not  meant  for  your  ten-trip  ticket  op 
portunists,  who,  as  is  well  known,  fall  into  a 
49 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

lax  and  desultory  suburbanism  incompatible 
with  sound  commutership,  but  for  the  men  of 
the  iron  schedule,  who  do  the  deed  twice  daily, 
come  what  may.  They  alone,  for  example, 
could  appreciate  the  sketches  of  prominent 
"  commuters "  who  had  won  fame  at  one  end 
of  the  tunnel  while  dining  successfully  every 
day  forty  miles  from  the  other  end.  Careers 
of  that  sort  are  always  heartening  to  a  "  com 
muter,"  teaching,  as  they  do,  that  home  may 
be  attained  each  night  and  at  the  same  time 
something  else  accomplished.  Such  lives  shine 
with  a  double  radiance,  when  there  is  something 
heroic  about  merely  reaching  home. 

Hence  the  peculiar  pleasure  of  reading  in 
Suburban  Days  about  a  famous  "  comedian 
and  commuter"  (the  wonder  of  his  being 
both!)  and  seeing  a  picture  of  his  lawn 
and  learning  that  he  raised  chickens,  which 
he  "  dearly  loved."  The  love  he  bore  those 
50 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

chickens  marks  him  as  a  true  "  commuter  " — * 
who  is  always  trying  to  raise  something  on  the 
place,  and  whether  it  be  a  hen  or  a  young  onion 
it  is  dearer  to  him  than  to  other  men  on  ac 
count  of  the  recurrent  periods  of  enforced  ab 
sence.  Continuity  will  often  cool  the  love  of 
chickens,  but  in  a  "  commuter's  "  life  of  bright 
renewals  and  extremely  sudden  cessations  the 
feeling  never  loses  any  of  its  early  warmth. 
And  so  it  is  with  Nature  generally,  despite  the 
sneer  of  a  recent  writer  that  the  "  commuter's  " 
"  return  to  Nature  is  only  half  way,"  and  that 
he  lacks  "the  perspective  of  robust  rurality." 
No  man  rushes  upon  Nature  more  madly  than 
he  or  when  torn  away  plucks  from  her  a  greater 
variety  of  little  keepsakes,  bouquets  of  chick- 
weed,  boutonnieres  of  beet  tops,  as  may  be  seen 
on  any  morning  train,  proofs  that  if  the  re 
turns  to  Nature  are  brief  they  are  at  least  pas 
sionate.  Your  professional  Nature-lover,  who 
51 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

mails  his  manuscripts  from  her  bosom,  could 
not  find  her  in  the  suburbs  at  all,  but  the  "  com 
muter  "  can,  the  keen  old  zealot  of  "  the  wild." 
He  noses  her  out  somehow  and  has  as  true  a 
forest  feeling  out  between  the  clothes  poles 
and  the  hedge  as  many  a  man  living  in  the  ut 
most  literary  wildness,  strewing  the  dry  bed  of 
the  mountain  torrent  with  the  galley  proofs  of 
his  "robust  rurality."  There  is  the  song  of 
the  river  in  his  garden  hose,  and  he  is  as  clearly 
Nature's  own  as  Professor  Woodside  beside  his 
trout-stream.  And  do  we  love  him  any  the  less 
for  his  greater  reticence? 

And  Suburban  Days,  being  a  well-edited 
magazine  and  true  to  its  policy,  saw  to  it  that 
each  biography  of  a  great  "  commuter  "  should 
refer  to  time  and  distance  not  as  obstacles  but 
as  blessings,  for  that  is  the  brave  tradition  of 
the  tribe.  They  give  him  a  chance  to  read  the 
morning  papers — those  sixty  golden  miles — 
5* 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

and  even  to  run  through  the  magazines,  and 
he  usually  gets  a  seat,  and  he  is  always  there 
almost  before  he  knows  it,  and  the  time  from 
the  front  gate  to  the  office  door  is  never  the 
two  hours  of  daily  fact,  but  the  hour  and  a 
half  of  generous  faith  or  some  single  tender 
memory.  Some  of  his  most  careful  work  has 
been  done  on  the  way.  If  a  writer,  some  of  his 
best  thoughts  have  come  to  him  on  the  train. 
Privately  I  may  say  that  every  time  a  thought 
of  any  kind  has  come  to  me  on  the  train,  an 
umbrella  or  a  handbag  has  somehow  floated 
away,  but  as  a  "  commuter  "  I  should  not  men 
tion  that. 


58- 


THE    HUMDRUM    OF    REVOLT 


IV 

THE     HUMDRUM     OF     REVOLT 

I  BELIEVE  Hedda  Gabler  is  generally  regarded 
as  the  most  disagreeable  of  all  Ibsen-kind.  She 
has  been  violently  assailed  and  with  equal  vio 
lence  "interpreted"  any  time  these  twenty 
years.  In  spite  of  the  attacks  and  the  even 
deadlier  explanations,  the  play  has  been  sev 
eral  times  successfully  presented  on  the  Amer 
ican  stage.  I  have  happened  to  see  it  only 
twice — once  with  a  native  actress  scolding  vine- 
garishly  in  the  title  role,  and  again  with  a 
Russian  lady  singing  approximate  English 
and  inventing  a  character  of  whom  Ibsen  had 
never  dreamt.  Nevertheless  the  words  of  the 
dramatist  were  there,  and  they  spoke  for  them- 
57 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

selves  through  all  disguises,  holding  the  inter 
est  of  friends  and  foes  alike,  Philistines  and 
illuminati,  the  people  who  thought  they  knew 
what  he  meant  and  the  people  who  did  not 
care.  No  doubt  the  excellent  gentlemen  who 
were  the  most  vituperative  in  the  capacity  of 
critics  were  the  most  enraptured  as  play-goers. 
For  a  gift  like  Ibsen's  enlivens  these  jaded 
folk  far  more  than  they  are  willing  to  admit. 
Deeply  absorbed  at  the  time  in  the  doings  of 
the  disagreeable  characters,  they  afterward  de 
fine  their  sensation  as  one  of  loathing,  and 
they  include  the  playwright  in  their  pious  ha 
tred,  like  newsboys  at  a  melodrama  pelting  the 
man  in  the  villain's  part.  It  comes  from  the 
national  habit  of  making  optimism  actually  a 
matter  of  conscience,  and  denying  the  validity 
of  any  feeling  unless  it  is  a  sleepy  one.  Con 
science,  it  would  seem,  is  a  moral  arm-chair 
heavily  upholstered. 

58 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Now,  of  course,  if  a  man's  own  wits  are  pre 
cisely  on  the  level  of  the  modern  American  and 
English  stage,  there  can  be  no  quarrel  with 
him  for  disliking  Ibsen.  If  there  is  no  lurking 
discontent  with  our  stage  and  its  traditions 
and  with  the  very  best  plays  of  Anglo-Saxon 
origin  produced  in  this  country  during  the  last 
twenty  years,  an  Ibsen  play  will  surely  seem 
a  malicious  interruption.  What  in  the  world 
has  a  good,  placid  American  audience  to  do 
with  this  half -mad  old  Scandinavian?  He 
writes  only  for  those  who  go  to  the  theatre  to 
be  disturbed.  /Instead  of  beginning  with  love 
in  difficulties  and  ending  with  a  happy  mar 
riage,  he  begins  with  happy  marriages  and 
ends  with  the  very  devil.  Considering  the  un 
erring  sagacity  with  which  all  good-looking 
walking  gentlemen  select  their  wives,  this  is 
nothing  short  of  blasphemy.  And  where  are 
the  signs  by  which  a  plain  man  may  tell  the 
59 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

virtues?  The  bloom  of  innocence  is  not  the 
mark  of  a  pure  soul,  but  of  no  soul  at  all.  The 
more  respectable  a  character,  the  more  apt  he 
is  to  drive  somebody  to  suicide. /There  are  no 
villains  to  hate.  *  Hate  centres  on  entirely 
blameless  people,  who  do  their  duty  and  break 
no  commandments,  on  good  husbands,  God 
fearing  parsons,  leading  citizens,  and  the  like 
— safe,  practical  folk  living  within  the  law  and 
having  the  goodness  that  gets  on  in  the  world. 
The  vices,  according  to  Ibsen,  are  often  the 
highly  successful  moralities  of  the  moment,  and 
the  virtues  are  seldom  quite  respectable.  He 
is  concerned  with  good  and  evil  as  purely  per 
sonal  affairs,  for  which  there  is  no  recipe  in 
any  moral  cook-book.  He  assumes  that  every 
body  has  his  own  little  moral  workshop. 

All  of  which  seems  commonplace  enough  to 
those  who  remain  to  some  degree  ferce  natures 
— that  is  to  say,  a  bit  restive  under  social  im- 
60 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

peratives,  or  at  least  mildly  inquisitive  toward 
the  totem  poles  of  the  particular  horde,  clan, 
phratry,  "  better  element,"  world  power,  vil 
lage  congregation,  club,  class,  home  circle  or 
moral  chorus,  wherein  they  find  themselves  im 
bedded;  but  it  is  very  baffling  indeed  to  the 
peaceful  groupthinker.  Nothing  so  makes  a 
man's  head  spin  as  to  detach  his  mind  from 
the  social  mass  with  which  it  has  coagulated 
in  his  middle  age.  And  the  twinge  of  an  un 
used  spiritual  muscle  is  generally  defined  as  a 
prick  of  conscience.  There  is  no  doubt  what 
ever  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  best  fami 
lies,  the  solid  citizens,  those  "  whom  the  nation 
delights  to  honour,"  and  the  "  backbone  of  this 
republic,"  that  the  spirit  of  an  Ibsen  play  is 
immoral,  indecent,  perverse,  and  morbid.  It 
was  his  purpose  to  have  it  so.  Indeed,  people 
are  not  nearly  so  uncomfortable  as  he  meant 
them  to  be. 

61 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

But  to  return  to/ the  ignominious  chronicle 


of  Hedda  Gabler^/  that  needless  Norwegian 
young  woman  who,  after  OTC  acts  in  demon 
stration  of  her  superfluity,  commits  suicide  at 
the  fall  of  the  curtain.  No  character  to  speak 
of,  no  respect  for  the  gods  of  others  or  power 
to  make  a  god  of  her  own,  a  few  appetites,  but 
without  will  either  to  gratify  or  to  subdue 
them,  hence  buzzing  with  little  discontents  and 
self-pityings  in  foolish  maladjustment  to  the 
predestined  pint  pot— r4he  is  like,  well,  almost 
anybody  at  some  stage  of  life,  and  like  a  good 
many  quite  ordinary  folk  all  through,  except 
that  she  killed  herself,  while  they,  with  no  more 
reason,  go  on  living.  To  be  sure,  matters  did 
seem  rather  desperate — married  to  Tesman,  for 
instance,  that  utter  doctor  of  philosophy,  ash 
man  of  modern  "  original  research,"  to  be 
found  in  any  American  college  catalogue.  A 
single  hour  of  him  is  bad  enough,  as  every  one 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

knows  who  has  met  him  anywhere  outside  a 
bibliography,  for  he  is  the  product  of  that  love 
for  "German  thoroughness"  which  never  asks 
what  the  thoroughness  is  all  about  or  what 
other  faculty  than  memory  the  thoroughgoing 
creature  possesses,  but  gives  the  name  of 
scholar  along  with  goodness  knows  what  pink- 
lined  hoods,  doctorates,  fellowships,  chairs, 
stools,  alcoves,  and  pedagogical  perches  to  any 
academic  beetle  who  gathers  into  shapeless  lit 
tle  fact-heaps  or  monographs  the  things  that 
a  scholar  would  throw  away.  A  life  of  inces 
sant  wiving  and  mothering  of  Tesmans  (the 
lower  academic  organisms  breed  rapidly  be 
tween  monographs)  might  well  stretch  out  in 
rather  appalling  eternities,  especially  to  a 
highly  strung  young  woman  of  the  sort  that 
demands  much  and  gives  nothing. 
]  For  Hedda  lacked  those  impulses  which  help 
some  women  to  pass  the  time  even  when  they 
63 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

have  married  Tesmans.  She  had  not  that  fero 
cious  nest-making  passion  which  often  serves 
as  well  to  keep  a  woman  busy  as  romantic  love, 
religion,  or  the  spending  of  money,  and  which 
might  have  wreaked  itself  for  forty  years  on 
dusting  Tesman  furniture.  Nor  could  she 
throw  herself,  as  women  do  in  our  own  little 
university  Tesmanias,  into  societies  of  literary 
endeavour,  genealogical  congratulation,  sex- 
patriotism;  or  move  in  solid  phalanx  upon  the 
works  of  William  Shakespeare,  cheered  onward 
by  the  pale  but  unscathed  gentleman  in  the  low 
collar  who  had  read  the  bard ;  or  lead  "  the 
literary  life"  (short  stories  with  sweet  end 
ings,  full  of  "uplift,"  for  wonderfully  homo 
geneous  magazines) ;  or  read  papers  at  the 
Woman's  Auxiliary  Annex  of  that  local  Sim 
plified  Spelling  Lodge  of  which  Tesman  would 
assuredly  have  been  an  active  member.  £jtn 
other  words,  she  lacked  not  only  the  heroism  of 
64 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

perfect  domesticity,  but  the  fire  of  parochial 
ambition.      / 

Desperate  as  the  case  was,  there  might  have 
been  something  to  do  had  there  been  any  heart 
for  it,  but  Hedda  was  one  of  those  sub  voce 
insurgents  who  wait  until  insurrections  become 
respectable — would  have  liked  to  murder  Tes- 
man  if  murder  were  in  good  repute,  saw  noth 
ing  wrong  in  adultery,  but  did  think  it  impo 
lite.  She  wanted  firebrand  joys,  if  only  they  \ 
did  not  raise  the  social  temperature.  She  -* 
thought  she  had  ideas  of  her  own  merely  be 
cause  she  lacked  the  ideas  of  other  people  and 
would  like  to  do  a  "beautiful  deed,"  the  meas 
ure  of  beauty  being  its  distance  from  the  stand 
ard  of  the  neighbourhood.  In  short,  she  felt 
the  glamour  of  the  unconventional,  believing 
even  that  an  intoxicated  gentleman,  instead  of 
being  sent  home  in  a  cab  by  those  whom  he 
annoyed  by  his  stertorous  breathing,  talked 
65 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

like  an  Horatian  ode,  or  danced  blithely,  "  with 
vine  leaves  in  his  hair,"  on  a  Grecian  vase  in 
bas-relief.  fSo  Lovborg  seemed  to  her  a  man 
who  lived  his  life,  which  he  passed  either  in 
getting  drunk  or  being  petted  by  women  for 
staying  sober.  He  happened  to  be  a  man  of 
talent,  too,  but  she  cared  little  for  that,  valu 
ing  him  merely  as  a  fallen  angel.  But  he, 
though  glad  enough  to  take  Byronic  advan 
tage  of  any  fallen  angel  point  of  view  of  any 
pretty  woman,  and  liking  the  "  vine  leaves  in 
his  hair "  and  other  euphemisms,  turned  for 
any  real  help  in  his  work  to  another  sort  of 
woman,  one  less  fearful  of  her  neighbours* 
tongues.  jHedda  envied  the  other  woman's  in 
fluence,  but  would  not  have  paid  the  other 
woman's  price. 

J  How  to  have  a  hand  in  Lovborg's  life  with 
out  doing  anything  for  Lovborg,  how  to  be  a 
power  in  her  little  world  along  the  line  of  least 
66 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

resistance?  JWell,  she  could  at  least  keep  him 
in  his  fallen  angel  state,  and  by  encouraging 
him  to  drink  and  burning  his  manuscript  show 
herself  not  altogether  impotent  for  good  or 
evil,  and  incidentally  avenge  herself  on  the 
other  woman;  and  by  urging  him  to  a  "beau 
tiful  deed" — that  is,  to  kill  himself — she  could 
do  something  for  the  picturesque.  Nobody 
need  know,  and  her  revolt  against  circum 
stances  being  a  private  affair,  she  would  still 
be  respectable.  But  circumstances  shifted,  and 
she  must  either  figure  in  a  vulgar  scandal  or 
do  the  bidding  of  an  intriguing  admirer,  who 
had  found  her  out.  So  she  killed  herself,  fol 
lowing  still  the  line  of  least  resistance.  Never 
was  suicide  less  horrifying.  So  little  of  value 
was  there  in  her  that  it  seemed  less  like  taking 
human  life  than  like  removing  debris.  Her 
soul,  if  she  ever  had  one,  had  long  since  gone 
to  the  button-moulder. 
67 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

And  who  is  there  for  us  to  praise  or  blame 
and  of  what  use  is  a  play  unless  we  come  away 
praising  or  blaming  somebody  and  reassured 
in  all  the  sentiments  we  had  about  us  when  we 
first  went  in?  Is  the  stage  a  place  for  sheer 
blank  wonder  why  people  live  at  all  or  why 
there  are  so  many  of  them — like  the  piazza  of 
a  summer  hotel?  j  For  this  poor  lady  was  be 
yond  the  nourishment  of  either  the  good  or  the 
bad.  She  had  no  heart  for  keeping  the  Com 
mandments  nor  any  heart  for  breaking  them, 
and  at  no  point  can  we  say  things  would  have 
been  better  had  she  done  otherwise,  but  only  if 
she  had  been  resouled  or  reborn  or  not  born  at 
all.  j  Therein  she  resembles  a  host  of  techni 
cally  good  and  useful  persons,  save  that  she 
felt  the  tedium  of  personal  vacancy,  whereas 
they  quite  forget  it  in  the  dust  raised  by  a 
thousand  and  one  enigmatic  social  activities, 
buying  and  selling,  despatching  details,  whirl- 
68 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ing  around  at  the  world's  business  of  keeping 
the  world  as  it  is,  feeling  no  private  incentive 
whatever  while  pushed  along  by  the  little  pro 
prieties. 

But  if  the  law  of  other  people  seems  not  to 
fit  one's  own  peculiar  soul,  it  does  not  follow 
that  one  can  flourish  on  the  bald  denial  of  it. 
That  is  the  simple  faith  of  the  clever  few,  who, 
hating  a  crowd,  think  wisdom  the  mathematical 
converse  of  what  the  crowd  thinks,  and  truth 
a  negative  adverb,  and  wit  merely  the  longest 
perpendicular  distance  from  the  axis  of  the 
commonplace,  and  so,  by  taking  a  bee-line 
away  from  the  obvious,  arrive  in  disconcert 
ingly  large  numbers  at  the  North  Pole  of  com- 
monsense.  They  believe  with  Hedda  that  the 
beauty  of  the  deed  lies  in  its  shock  to  the  neigh 
bourhood,  confounding  the  love  of  truth  with 
a  sort  of  agoraphobia,  substituting  one  form 
ula  for  another,  but  living  by  formula,  never- 
69 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

theless.  Surely  people  never  seem  so  much 
alike  as  when  at  particular  pains  to  seem  dif 
ferent — witness  the  family  likeness  between 
men  with  long  hair.  It  is  as  hard  to  find  an  in 
dividual  in  the  most  advanced  group  of  devil- 
worshippers  as  in  the  Main  street  Baptist 
Church.  It  is  not  the  size  of  the  group  or  its 
moral  code,  but  the  extent  to  which  it  has  di 
gested  you  that  decides  the  question  whether 
your  soul  is  your  own.  Pioneering  spirits  re 
quire  a  surprising  idegree  of  unanimity  on  their 
exclusive  planes.  /  Hedda  was  merely  a  me 
chanical  dissenter.  She  might  have  been  a 
brilliant  essayist,  paradoxical  playwright, 
iconoclastic  minor  poet,  if  she  had  only  known. 
But  Ibsen  killed,  her,  thinking  it  perhaps  the 
happier  ending.  | 

The  lesson  in  it  for  me  is  that  there  is  no 
lesson,  and  the  pleasure  of  it  is  merely  that  of 
intimacy  with  a  fellow-mortal,  to  a  degree  sel- 
70 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

dom  permitted  off  the  stage,  and  never  allowed 
upon  it  by  any  modern  English-speaking  play 
wright  who  knows  on  which  side  his  bread  is 
buttered.  For  years  the  allegorical  procession 
has  trooped  along  behind  the  footlights,  laud 
able  characters  beautifully  rewarded,  ladies  re 
penting  in  the  nick  of  time,  knaves  duly  pun 
ished,  tender  babes,  rugged  cowboys  of  ster 
ling  worth,  brusque  but  well-meaning  uncles, 
Wayward  sons  with  hearts  in  the  right  place, 
and  wives  either  resisting  temptation  or  yield 
ing  to  it  at  their  peril,  and  never  one  of  them 
having  any  life  apart  from  their  moral  mis 
sion  to  me.  As  a  play-goer  I  have  done  noth 
ing  but  learn  my  lessons,  and  have  seldom  met 
a  human  being,  even  a  disagreeable  one.  As  a 
play-goer  I  have  learned  to  be  monogamous, 
an  upholder  of  the  hearth,  almost  an  andiron. 
The  theatre  in  the  course  of  fifteen  years  has 
taught  me  not  to  marry  the  adventuress,  or  to 

•n 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

pass  myself  off  as  the  real  heir,  or  to  poison 
the  lady's  mind  against  my  rival,  or  to  specu 
late  with  my  sister's  trust  funds,  or  to  marry 
the  wrong  person  before,  I  know  that  the  ob 
ject  of  my  affections  is  really  dead,  or  to  throw 
my  life  away  merely  because  the  letter  did  not 
reach  me  in  the  mail.  I  hate  assassins  and  I 
give  self-evident  hypocrites  a  piece  of  my  mind. 
I  never  run  away  with  anybody  except  with 
the  most  honourable  intentions.  All  this  and 
much  more  I  have  learned  as  a  play-goer,  but 
as  a  person  I  have  hardly  ever  seen  another 
person  on  the  American  stage,  and  have  no 
reason  to  expect  that  any  practical  playwright 
will  ever  permit  me  to  do  so.  Hence  the  sur 
prise  and  pleasure  of  the  recognition — espe 
cially  when  it  comes  about  through  an  unpre 
possessing  old  Norseman,  shorn  of  all  native 
charm  by  translation,  unblessed  by  humour  in 
any  form,  and  expecting  every  man  to  bring 
his  own  philosophy. 

72 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

But  any  resolute  public  thinker  can  some 
how  draw  a  lesson  from  it.  Perhaps  it  is  an 
allegory  of  the  wages  of  sin.  Or,  if  Mr.  G. 
Bernard  Shaw  is  your  mental  executor,  you 
will  certainly  see  in  it  "  humanity  outgrowing 
its  ideals."  I  Or  may  Hedda  not  symbolise  the 
undoing  of  the  artistic  temperament,  as  an 
other  interpreter  has  shown?  Or  the  duty  of 
adultery?  Or  suicide  as  a  pardonable  manner 
of  exit  from  married  life  with  a  doctor  of  phil 
osophy?  Then  there  is  Mr.  Roosevelt — is  she 
not  a  plain  warning  against  letting  the  heart 
stray  from  the  home?  And  the  Prohibition 
ist  platform — had  not  Lovborg  drained  the 
fatal  cup,  Hedda  might  be  living  to  this 
day,  the  mother  of  nine  little  Tesmans.  For 
this  old  inquisitor-general  of  all  the  formulas 
is  forthwith  translated  into  many  formulas,  and 
by  the  strangest  of  ironies  it  has  come  to  pass 
that  the  self-same  Ibsen  who  cursed  people  for 
not  finding  separate  ways  of  their  own  now 
73 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

trails  behind  him  a  long  and  solemn  file  of 
"  Ibsenites  *'  in  accurate  locks  tep  with  him 
self.  So  hard  is  it  not  to  commend  our  souls 
unto  our  neighbours,  or  to  live  a  life  without 
forming  a  committee  on  the  rules  of  living. 
It  is  a  wonder  that  we  still  contrive  to  die  per 
sonally  instead  of  somehow  getting  ourselves 
collectively  adjourned.  And  assuming  the 
chance  of  a  future  life,  consider  the  embarrass 
ment  of  the  sorting  angels  trying  to  pick  out 
the  personal  particles  as  we  arrive  in  our  re 
spective  packages — schools  of  thought  and 
squads  of  taste.  Fancy  trying  to  tell  which, 
in  any  essential  sense,  is  which,  in  a  group 
of  recent  American  novelists  or  business  men, 
party  leaders,  "  representative  New  Yorkers," 
successful  playwrights,  literary  critics  (by 
tradition),  aristocrats  by  birth,  aristocrats 
by  reading  Browning,  or  any  of  the  other 
needlessly  agglutinated  bundles  of  public-spir- 
74 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ited,  public-opinionated,  privately  disinherited 
ghosts. 

To  be  sure,  the  spirit  of  an  Ibsen  play,  if 
once  revealed,  would  be  very  disconcerting  to 
many  settled  minds.  It  should  be  concealed, 
for  example,  from  the  tender  millionaire  and 
shrinking  railway  president  and  shy  upholder 
of  vested  interests  and  all  in  whom  the  private 
moral  and  the  public  countenance  are  smiling 
twins,  and  perhaps  also  from  the  "  plain  peo 
ple,"  for,  according  to  our  editors  and  pub 
lishers,  they  are  always  very  delicate,  and  most 
certainly  from  those  whom  the  people  choose, 
for  any  sort  of  new  feeling  might  shake  the 
very  foundations  of  immediate  success.  But  it 
is  safe  enough  for  terrible  fellows  like  you  and 
me,  dear  brother-scribe  or  fellow-failure,  rav 
ening  among  the  flesh-pots  of  literary  specu 
lation,  libertines  of  dreams,  reckless  of  the 
modern  writer  at  his  fiercest,  ready  for  any 
75 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

giant  that  may  come  out  in  the  magazines, 
even  though  he  eat  us  skin,  bones,  and  moral 
sense,  ready  for  the  incendiaries  of  the  imagi 
nation  and  regretting  only  that  in  these  well- 
watered  literary  times  the  fancy  will  not  burn. 
It  is  not  for  us  to  complain  that  any  drama 
on  the  modern  stage  is  intellectually  upsetting, 
but  rather  that  it  does  not  upset  us  so  utterly 
as  we  could  wish. 

In  a  book  about  anarchists  which  I  read  not 
long  ago,  the  author  either  described  or  inven 
ted  two  characters  which  had  Hedda  Gabler's 
same  power  of  suggesting  analogies.  He  said 
it  was  a  study  of  the  temperament  of  revolt, 
and  an  attempt  to  make  clear  the  natural  his 
tory  of  anarchists.  One  of  them  was  a  girl 
of  the  slums,  who  became  the  mistress  of  a 
rhapsodical  young  anarchist  with  literary 
tastes.  Her  mother  was  half  German,  half 
French  and  often  hysterical;  her  father  was 
76 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

a  German  machinist  and  generally  drunk. 
Sensuality,  neurasthenia,  a  potential  talent  too 
weak  to  work,  insatiable  egotism  given  to  what 
may  be  called  auto-poetry  or  self-crooning 
(private  lyrics  of  one's  peculiar  soul  not  nec 
essarily  musical  but  imagining  a  very  musical 
applause),  and  above  all  much  hit-or-miss  read 
ing  of  writings  reputed  extreme — and  you 
have  the  heroine,  or,  rather,  a  considerable 
part  of  her,  for  she  was  too  good  a  literary  or 
natural  product  to  equal  any  such  bare  list  of 
qualities.  One  thing  she  certainly  was  not,  and 
that  is  a  mere  anarchist.  Her  relations  with 
the  anarchist  movement  were  merely  incidental. 
Any  excitable  artistic  male  might  have  done  as 
much  for  her  soul  as  the  anarchist  dreamer 
with  whom  she  fell  in  love,  and  "social 
rebel"  is  too  narrow  a  term  for  such  an  epi 
cure  of  emotion. 

\For  her,   as    for   Hedda   Gabler,   humdrum 
77 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

was  the  enemy,  not  "  society."  (  When  an 
archism  became  humdrum  she  took  to  the 
woods — went  into  a  camp  in  California, 
where  the  author  finally  leaves  her,  "making 
a  last  effort  to  live  the  straight  free  life  of 
Nature's  children,  a  suckling  at  the  breasts  of 
Mother  Earth,"  and  quoting  from  the  writ 
ings  of  Professor  Woodside,  the  Nature- 
lover.  A  new  birth,  he  calls  it.  A  new  appe 
tiser,  the  reader  says,  and  wonders  how  the 
feelings  are  to  be  scraped  together  next  month, 
though  quite  sure  that  she  will  get  them  some 
how.  The  author  seemed  blind  to  the  amount 
of  yeast  he  had  put  in  her.  He  seemed  not 
to  know  that  she  was  blessed  with  enough 
power  of  self-dramatisation  to  last  a  life 
time.  It  was  absurd  to  assume  that  she  would 
stay  long  with  Professor  Woodside  and  Na 
ture — small  blame  to  her,  for  far  less  restless 
souls  than  hers  have  fretted  under  that  com- 
78 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

pulsion.  It  was  absurd  to  assume  that  she 
would  stay  long  anywhere.  The  author  tried 
to  teach  a  lesson  by  her,  but  she  became  too 
real  a  person  to  stay  inside  his  proposition. 
That  is  the  danger  to  the  thesis-writer  of  draw 
ing  a  character  too  well ;  it  walks  off  on  its 
own  feet,  snapping  its  fingers  at  the  author's 
educational  intentions. 

It  is  proof  of  some  power  in  a  book  if  it  sets 
one  to  speculating  in  this  way,  hunting  anal 
ogies,  exceeding  the  author's  apparent  design, 
and  interviewing  the  characters  on  one's  own 
account.  The  pleasant  clever  novels  of  the  day 
leave  no  such  illusion  that  the  characters  have 
got  away,  and  give  no  such  impulse  to  a  wild- 
goose  chase.  It  is  a  strange  man  that  could 
remain  awake  five  minutes  beyond  his  usual 
time  with  any  of  the  persons  they  describe. 
Gone  like  a  glass  of  soda  water;  cheerful  but 
done  with ;  as  ancient  and  hazy  after  two  ticks 
79 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

of  the  clock  as  Tiglath-Pileser ;  and  the  soul 
now  ready  to  be  completely  absorbed  in  the 
deeds  of  the  flies  on  the  window  pane. 

Her  anarchist  lover  talked  incessantly  out 
of  books  with  frequent  allusions  to  seismic  souls 
and  Cosmos.  It  was  the  voice  of  literary 
youth,  or  of  any  man  in  a  radical  mood,  called 
"  modern "  by  reviewers  who  pretend  not  to 
know  that  radicalism  is  a  ratio,  not  a  creed, 
and  may  have  been  a  constant  ratio,  for  aught 
we  know,  since  the  first  rebellious  anthropoph- 
agus  condemned  the  table  manners  of  the  best 
society.  He  said  the  world  to  him  was  a  "  halt 
ing  hell  of  hitching-posts  and  of  truculent 
troughs  for  belching  swineherds." 

He  was  the  slave  of  the  principle,  no  work 
without  inspiration,  and  tramped  and  moped 
and  starved  rather  than  turn  his  hand 
to  any  task  that  seemed  for  the  moment  dis 
agreeable.  The  disagreeableness  of  the  task 
80 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

was    proof   to   him  that  it  went   against  the 
freedom  of  his  nature,  was  a  form  of  social 
coercion  to  which  he  is  anarchist  must  rise  su 
perior.     To  work  for  wages   was  to  approve 
the  system  of  exploitation.     To  work  for  ap 
plause  was  also  base.    One  cannot  be  quite  sure 
of  one's  motives.     He  must  wait  for  a  work 
impulse  that  should  be  self-evidently  untram 
melled  and  unalloyed,  an  autogenetic  impulse, 
a  sort  of  moral  seizure;  then  the  mind  might 
work  with  anarchistic  propriety,  work  because 
it  really  wished  to,  voluntarily  up  and  dance, 
or  be  bowled  along  the  line  of  no  resistance. 
But  there  are  often  long  intervals  between  these 
happy   turns,    for  there  is   treason   within   us 
from  the  anarchistic  point  of  view.     The  mind 
is  already  compromised;  the  thoughts  are  by 
no  means  free  (some  of  them  snub  others)  :  the 
reason  is  often  browbeaten,  and  sneaking  little 
conventionalities   start  up   every  moment   and 
811 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

run  the  intellect  in  their  own  way;  clearly  the 
mind  has  been  altogether  overrun  by  "  society," 
the  enemy.  Hence  waiting  around  for  pure 
ego-work  to  begin,  soul  cries,  self-outbursts,  is 
apt  to  run  to  very  long  pauses  indeed,  for  the 
harder  one  looks  inside  his  head  the  more  en 
tangled  it  seems  with  "  society."  And  as  the 
muscles  need  the  pressure  of  objects  that  resist, 
a  mind  thus  denied  all  exercise  is  apt  to  become 
at  first  flaccid  and  short  of  breath,  and  then,  a 
mere  pendulous,  foolish  thing  awaiting  justifi 
cation  by  galvanism.  So  our  anarchist  ran  his 
course.  He  was  very  logical.  He  applied  the 
principles  of  anarchism  to  his  own  mind,  and 
with  entire  consistency  in  freedom's  cause  he  let 
it  go  to  pieces. 

In  his  company  the  heroine  plunged  into  in 
discriminate  reading  of  the  brilliant  writers  of 
the  time,  some  with  wings,  some  with  dubious 
flying  machines  of  their  own  devising,  but  all 
82 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

essaying  an  upward  and  forward  motion,  skip 
pers  of  tradition,  and  if  not  pioneers,  at  least 
fugitives  from  commonplace.  She  brought  to 
them  a  mind  without  previous  acquisitions  and 
an  experience  almost  exclusively  physiological. 
So  she  became,  like  certain  insurgent  magazine 
verses,  extremely  vague  as  to  the  identity  of 
her  oppressors,  sure  only  of  her  revolt.  She 
quivered  as  she  read  like  an  unballasted  re 
viewer  afloat  in  some  tempest  of  "  strong " 
writing,  in  a  Jack  London  gale,  for  example, 
with  the  words  "  primal "  and  "  elemental " 
tearing  through  the  shrouds.  "  Cosmos  "  and 
"  cosmic,"  as  her  lover  used  them,  would  at 
times  delightfully  capsize  her.  She  began 
her  thinking  in  terms  of  enormous  girth 
and  unapprehended  content.  Her  first 
ghost  stories  were  of  "  society."  She  had 
a  woman's  very  personal  way  with  large 
abstractions,  making  enemies  or  pets  of 
83 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

them,  like  the  woman  quoted  by  Professor 
James :  "  I  do  so  love  to  cuddle  up  to 
God."  She  acquired  that  precocity  of  lit 
erary  feeling1  which  prompts  to  "  confessions  " 
in  advance  of  thinking,  and  you  will  find  her 
likeness  in  a  great  deal  of  the  premature  po 
etry  of  the  present,  written  in  a  flutter  of  ex 
pectation  over  an  idea  that  does  not  come. 

No  plodding  for  her.  "  Small  hath  contin 
ual  plodding  ever  won,  save  base  author 
ity  from  others'  books."  But  occasional 
plodding  is  necessary  even  for  the  epicure 
of  emotions,  to  get  up  an  appetite  for 
the  next  sudden  revelation.  She  read  for 
the  pleasure  of  feeling  the  thought  jump, 
but  without  the  acquisition  of  a  good 
deal  of  dense  traditional  stuff  there  is  nothing 
for  the  thought  to  jump  from  or  over.  Where 
is  the  fun  in  seeing  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  knock 
ideas  down  if  one  has  not  first  met  them  stand- 
81 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ing  up?  Apart  from  any  question  of  truth, 
or  character,  or  the  "meaning  of  life,"  and 
merely  from  the  point  of  view  of  sportsman 
ship,  the  mind  needs  its  level  expanses,  studious 
trifles,  sleepy  acquisitions,  dry  details,  tradi 
tional  irrelevanciesi,  statistics,  tariff  discus 
sions,  polite  conversation,  leading  articles  and 
mild  ambling  poetry,  including  many  hymns — 
in  short,  must  plod  along  rather  diligently  at 
intervals  for  a  due  sense  of  the  length,  breadth, 
thickness  and  perfect  humanity  of  platitude, 
from  which  alone  the  rocketing  may  be  en 
joyed.  Otherwise  these  hop-skip- and- jump 
fellows  will  seem  pioneers  from  nowhere  or  in 
surgents  against  nothing  in  particular.  Even 
as  mere  pleasure-givers  they  will  pall,  if  one 
does  not  retain  some  laborious  habits,  remain 
something  of  a  scholar  in  commonplace  things. 
She  wanted  the  emotions  without  gathering 
any  material  for  them  to  act  upon. 
85 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

She  lacked,  therefore,  the  staying  power  nec 
essary  even  to  successful  hedonism,  could  not 
stand  the  training,  the  abstinence,  the  exercise. 
One  sees  signs  of  her  in  all  classes,  not  merely 
in  the  slums  and  not  necessarily  versed  in  anar 
chism.  The  most  of  her  will  perhaps  be  found 
in  literary  Arcadias,  where,  as  they  will  tell 
you,  they  have  "  good  talk."  But  she  pricks  the 
mind  to  seeking  analogies  in  very  respectable 
quarters,  which  must  not  be  mentioned  lest  they 
seem  far-fetched,  or  violate  a  confidence,  or  pro 
voke  a  libel  suit. 


86 


THE     USUAL    THING 


V 

THE     USUAL     THING 

I  SUPPOSE  I  should  sadly  miss  New  York's  best 
Society  if  it  ever  vanished  from  our  books.  It 
is  only  in  American  satire  and  fiction  that  I 
shall  ever  visit  those  expensive  places,  where, 
as  a  distinguished  novelist  has  recently  said,. 
"  proud  beauty  hides  its  eyes  on  the  shoulder 
of  haughty  commercial  or  financial  youth  while 
golden  age  dips  its  nose  in  whatever  symbol 
ises  the  Gascon  wine  in  the  paternal  library." 
In  Cornville,  Massachusetts,  where  I  now  live, 
the  people  do  not  do  such  things.  And  I  like 
to  think  as  I  shake  the  furnace  down  of  nights 
how  different  those  upper  people  are,  and  how 
remote  from  life's  realities  and  coal-bins,  and 
89 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

especially  how  shallow,  up  there  on  the  silly 
surface  of  the  earth,  compared  to  a  deep  per 
son  like  myself,  good  old  truepenny,  down  at 
the  bottom  of  things,  tenax  propositi  beneath 
the  cellar  stairs.  Probably  there  are  not  two 
fine  minds  in  that  entire  class,  said  the  distin 
guished  novelist.  I  like  to  doubt  if  there  is 
even  one  good  soul.  Noodles  and  Jezebels,  say 
I,  the  whole  pack  of  them ;  and  I  like  to  think 
that  the  Cornville  circle  in  which  I  move  is  full 
of  plain  people  but  profound,  hearts  of  oak 
with  no  nonsense  about  them,  or  people  of 
"  Culture " — the  real  thing,  not  from  Chau- 
tauqua  but  from  Cambridge — or  people  at  once 
instructive  and  blithe,  giant  minds  at  play,  gay 
astronomers,  bubbling  palaeontologists.  And  I 
like  to  look  down  from  these  people  of  my 
fancy  on  that  other  kind  of  people  whom  I  do 
not  know,  and  to  hate  the  Persic  apparatus 
and  that  symbolic  Gascon  wine,  and  to  feel  that 
90 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

I  am  intellectual   and  integer  vitce  and  other 
things  that  money  cannot  buy. 

So  I  try  and  cherish  the  simple  faith,  built 
on  the  writings  of  some  sixty  years,  from 
George  William  Curtis  downwards,  that  New 
York  Society  is  made  up,  not  of  people,  but  of 
types,  each  with  a  moral  meaning  no  less  plain 
that  the  personages  in  Pilgrim's  Progress.  But 
it  is  not  easy  to  believe  in  types  as  compounded 
by  the  usual  writer — phrase-haunted,  fiction- 
rooted  creature  that  he  is,  athirst  for  moral 
contrasts — and  it  so  happens  that  no  unusual 
writer  has  ever  written  of  our  best  Society. 
Your  true  novelist  does  not  stop  with  type; 
he  completes  an  individual,  having  some  mo 
mentum  of  his  own,  doing  or  saying  the  unex 
pected  thing,  often  irrelevant;  and  I  suppose 
if  New  York  had  had  a  Thackeray  or  Mere 
dith  her  fashionable  folk  might  have  seemed 
more  probable.  As  it  is  we  have  only  Mrs. 
911 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Potiphar,  the  Reverend  Cream  Cheese,  the  Set- 
turn  Downes,  Minerva  Tattle,  Timon  Croesus, 
and  later  their  derivatives  with  hyphenated 
names,  abstractions  whose  daughters  marry 
English  lords,  metaphors  who  run  away  with 
one  another's  wives,  Van  This,  a  virtue,  and 
Van  That,  a  vice,  and  the  sad  tale  of  some  fig 
ure  of  speech  who  lost  all  his  money  and  then 
shot  himself.  In  books  the  authentic  Vanity 
Fairs  all  seem  to  come  from  foreign  parts. 

Exposed  as  I  am  to  only  potato-patch  temp 
tations  I  should  like  to  realise  these  moral 
perils  of  our  gilded  halls,  but  in  our  native 
writings  this  is  difficult.  No  story  of  damna 
tion  is  complete  without  a  man,  and  no  writer 
on  our  best  Society  has  created  one.  For  the 
usual  literary  mind  is,  as  is  well  known,  lined 
with  a  kind  of  wall-paper,  running  a  pattern 
not  its  own.  Novelists  do  not  invent  or  ob 
serve;  they  rearrange  their  literary  memories. 
92 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Satirists  borrow  not  only  their  scorn  but  even 
the  objects  of  it.  And  surely  no  fashionable 
group  is  more  subdued  to  precedent.  They 
have  their  pen-fashions  and  their  etiquette  with 
goodness  knows  what  literary  gentilities,  pass 
words,  cachets,  literary  class  distinctions,  hor 
rors  of  the  unaccustomed,  rules  of  who's  who 
and  what's  what  and  the  proper  thing  in  he 
roes  and  the  proper  thing  in  thoughts. 

A  hundred  years  of  precedent  will  rule  the 
action  of  a  woman's  face,  especially  the  hero 
ine's.  It  must  be  a  face  in  which  the  colour 
comes  and  goes — run  by  the  literary  signal 
service.  Shadows  must  flit  across  it,  smiles 
light  it,  horror  freeze  it,  blushes  warm  it,  moral 
indignation  turn  it  purely  cold.  And  not  once 
will  that  ever-busy  face  swerve  from  its  prece 
dents.  The  novelist  will  not  employ  the  com 
paratively  uneventful  human  face;  still  less 
will  he  devise  a  face  and  run  it  arbitrarily  to 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

suit  himself.  I  recall,  to  be  sure,  one  charac 
ter  in  fiction  whose  "whole  face  upheaved" — 
plainly  an  innovation — but  she  belonged  to 
the  self-willed  Henry  James,  an  anarch  among 
novelists. 

And  considering  how  writers  set  about  their 
tasks  it  may  be  unreasonable  to  expect  any 
sort  of  lifelike  consequence.  A  novel  is  not  a 
product  of  imagination.  It  is  the  electic  ef 
fort  of  a  literary  memory  schooled  by  a  social 
demand.  Probably  it  is  no  more  reasonable  to 
look  for  human  nature  in  a  novel  than  to  look 
for  Nature  in  a  woman's  hat.  Not,  of  course, 
to  compare  a  great  novel  with  any  hat  however 
admirable.  That  would  be  equally  disparag 
ing  to  both;  one  does  not  care  to  think  of  a 
work  of  genius  as  disappearing  like  a  hat  or  of 
a  hat  as  surviving  like  a  work  of  genius ;  the 
thought  of  an  eternal  hat  is  even  hateful.  But 
between  the  hats  of  the  highest  rank  and  the 
94 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

novels  of  the  second  there  seems  to  be  a  sound 
analogy. 

For  each  being  a  work  of  customary  or 
crowd-derived  inspiration,  their  value  in  depict 
ing  life  is  much  the  same.  One  matches  human 
nature  as  already  published;  the  other  matches 
Nature  as  already  worn  on  hats.  So  with  a 
host  of  virilities  and  vitalities,  love-storms, 
moral  whirlwinds,  Ruritanias,  calls  of  the  wild 
• — you  never  meet  the  novelist  who  first  em 
ployed  them.  You  see  the  thousand  hats  that 
followed  the  example  but  never  the  great,  brave, 
strong,  protagonistic  and  outrageous  hat  that 
,set  it. 

The  call  of  the  wild  as  seen  on  women's  hats 
some  seasons  past  proved  no  wild  fancies  in 
the  heads  beneath  them.  It  was  a  call  to  prec 
edent.  When  you  found  on  a  hat  some  singular 
bit  from  wildlife,  say  a  weasel  sleeping  on  its 
native  beads  or  biting  its  light  blue  omelette, 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

it  was  not  a  sign  of  any  personal  wildness.  It 
had  occurred  on  many  hats  before.  And  so 
with  the  novels  then  in  season.  The  call  of 
the  wild  in  novels  at  that  time  was  not  a  call 
to  any  special  wildness ;  it  was  the  peaceful 
call  of  one  Jack  London  to  another.  The  law 
of  each  craft  is  redistribution  of  the  parts, 
and  the  law  of  each  part  is  that  it  shall  have 
appeared  successfully  in  public  not  very  long 
before. 

And  since  obedience  to  these  laws  is  usually 
unconscious,  I  have  heard  it  said  that  the  joy 
of  the  work  is  often  not  to  be  told  apart  from 
the  joy  of  first  creation.  Here  indeed  the  hat 
has  somewhat  the  advantage,  for  women  do 
sometimes  more  utterly  let  themselves  go,  feel 
more  of  that  first,  fine  careless  rapture,  in  a 
hat  than  the^novelist  does  in  his  novel.  And 
as  to  the  rule  that,  The  style  is  the  man,  though 
I  am  not  versed  in  the  equations  of  self-ex- 
96 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

pression,  I  believe  it  could  be  easily  proved  that 
the  hat  is  more  exactly  the  woman.  A  novel 
always  seems  a  form  of  self-concealment.  Yet 
a  woman  otherwise  quite  subdued  may  suddenly 
appear  in  a  hat  that  is  all  ablaze  with  feel 
ing1 — no  doubt  imprisoned  passion's  single  mad 
escape — and  you  sometimes  meet  a  hot,  infuri 
ate  hat,  hardly  venturing  to  look  at  the  rabid 
face  beneath,  yet  find  there  a  countenance  of 
great  serenity.  The  riot  of  emotion  had  passed 
off  in  the  hat,  leaving  the  soul  at  peace.  This 
is  not  true  of  novelists,  who,  on  the  contrary, 
seen  in  the  flesh,  show  personal  diversities  in 
hue,  texture,  patterns,  general  design,  degree 
of  animation,  not  to  be  guessed  from  any  of 
their  books. 

And  considering,  by  the  way,  the  firm  com 
mercial  basis  on  which  our  books  like  our  mil 
linery  so  often  rest,  I  wonder  why  writers  are 
generally  supposed  to  have  no  aptitude  for 

97 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

practical  affairs.  I  never  could  understand 
those  protracted  discussions  which  arise  when 
ever  a  romantic  novelist  takes  it  very  naturally 
into  his  head  that  he  would  make  a  good 
mayor  of  Jonesville.  It  is  the  practice  on  these 
occasions  to  treat  the  political  aspirations  of 
the  American  literary  man  in  a  scornful  man 
ner,  to  recall  the  fate  of  his  predecessors  and  to 
exhibit  the  supposed  incongruity  between  our 
belles  lettres  and  our  practical  politics.  So 
far  from  taking  it  as  a  matter  of  course  that 
our  popular  novelists  should  fail  in  politics, 
I  find  it  a  subject  not  only  for  regret  but  for 
astonishment.  They  are  a  hardy,  sagacious, 
business-like  breed.  They  are  predominantly 
civic  and  practical.  They  have  as  keen  an  in 
stinct  for  what  people  want  as  brewers,  hat- 
makers,  or  grocers,  and  they  are  aiming,  un 
consciously  perhaps,  at  results  as  immediate 
and  tangible.  In  no  other  country  is  there  so 
98 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

slight  a  difference  between  the  qualities  of  the 
popular  novelist  and  those  of  the  successful 
man  of  business.  The  successful  romantic  novel 
of  to-day  is  of  pure  business  all  compact.  Too 
little  is  said  of  the  mercantile  shrewdness  that 
goes  to  the  making  of  such  novels  and  the 
publishing  of  them  in  the  nick  of  time.  Leav 
ing  aside  any  literary  criterion,  I  hold  that 
as  high  commercial  qualities  distinguish  the 
authors  as  adorn  any  Senator  in  Washing 
ton. 

And  in  denying  literary  qualities  to  the 
evanescent  novelists  of  yesterday  or  to-day,  we 
do  but  smooth  away  certain  obstacles  in  their 
political  career.  It  is  well  known  that  among 
men  at  large  the  word  literary  has  a  formid 
able  and  exclusive  sound.  Even  the  word  book 
will  frighten  voters.  We  should  devise  an 
other  way  of  speaking  of  these  things.  When 
a  popular  writer  runs  for  office,  he  should  be 
99 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

referred  to  as  a  manufacturer  of  bibloids.  Let 
it  be  once  known  how  unliterary  most  writers 
really  are,  and  there  will  be  more  of  them  in 
the  Board  of  Aldermen.  Of  the  novelists  in 
this  country  to-day  there  are  but  two  men 
whose  talents  are  so  essentially  literary  as  to 
unfit  them  for  political  office.  It  is  of  course 
impossible  to  imagine  a  more  unloved  Assembly 
man  than  Mr.  Howells  or  a  more  scandalous 
State  Senator  than  Mr.  Henry  James.  In 
their  books  they  have  disregarded  a  popular 
mandate  on  every  page.  But  our  other  writ 
ers  are  guilty  of  no  such  divergence.  Who 
could  find  any  Pierian  austerity  abbut 
them?  Current  literature  is  not  a  jealous 
god;  nor  does  it  breed  unthrifty  habits, 
or  a  visionary  turn  of  mind,  or  levity, 
or  a  too  personal  view,  or  any  other  spir 
itual  twist  that  should  disable  a  man's 
politics.  On  the  contrary,  success  in  it  often 
100 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

proves  a  man  possessed  of  the  politician's 
greatest  gift,  the  instinct  for  majorities. 

Obvious  as  these  analogies  appear  they 
escape  our  critics  every  day.  Literary  criti 
cism  mainly  consists  in  judging  each  ordinary 
man  by  the  rules  of  a  different  game  from  the 
one  he  is  playing.  Hence  the  servilities  and 
hauteurs  of  those  strange  propounders  of  un 
natural  certitude,  the  literary  periodicals,  their 
hot  and  cold  fits,  false  starts  and  stampedes; 
praise  for  the  plodding  author  as  if  he  were  an 
artist,  curses  for  him  merely  because  he  is  not. 
A  critic  is  commonly  a  person  who  reads  with 
an  unusual  show  of  feeling  some  very  usual 
book,  then  tries  to  turn  the  writer's  head  com 
pletely  or  else  to  take  it  off. 

I  read  last  week  in  the  London  Bombardinian 

that  Robinson  and  Aristophanes  are  very  near 

of  kin.     To-day  I  learn  from  the  Weekly  Icha- 

bod  that  Robinson  in  contrast  to  past  glories 

101 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

is  the  vanishing-point  of  the  human  mind. 
Yet  Robinson  could  not  have  caused  these  per 
sons  this  excitement.  For  Robinson  is  com 
pounded  of  the  very  tissues  of  routine,  and  of 
like  substance  with  many  Browns  and  Joneses, 
and  the  mind  that  could  not  survey  Robinson 
with  composure  would  be  shattered  in  a  single 
day's  experience.  It  arose,  of  course,  from 
false  analogies.  One  dragged  in  masterpieces 
merely  to  light  up  Robinson;  the  other  to  cast 
him  in  the  shade.  On  reading  Robinson  they 
allowed  themselves  to  think  of  literature,  so  hor 
rid  comparisons  shot  into  their  heads;  whereas 
had  they  been  thinking  of  more  usual  things, 
of  hats,  cigars,  newspapers  or  their  daily  meals, 
they  might  have  shown  him  in  his  true  relations. 
And  since  with  a  few  exceptions  here  and 
there,  the  siftings  of  some  centuries,  writers 
do  not  report  credibly  of  one  another,  or  of 
any  man,  or  of  what  they  see  or  what  they  feel, 
103 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

but  are  men  of  a  borrowed  gesture,  custom- 
pushed,  too  close  to  the  world  to  give  an  ac 
count  of  it,  it  is  rash  to  judge  any  city  or  class 
or  group,  or  hang  any  dog  on  their  evidence. 
That  second  simplicity  which  our  best  Society 
has  not  attained  is  certainly  not  to  be  found 
in  the  books  about  it.  And  in  this  good-na 
tured  land  of  easy  prizes  and  quick  forgetful- 
ness  with  so  much  room  for  mediocrity  at  the 
top,  climbing  the  Society  ladder  does  not  con 
strain  to  any  more  uneasiness  of  pose  than 
climbing  the  literary  one.  They  are  not  a 
care- free  people,  those  "  Cultured  "  few.  Lit 
tle  of  devil-may-care  aristocracy  about  them; 
on  the  contrary  rather  a  painful  consciousness 
of  status,  it  would  seem,  with  need  of  very  fre 
quent  explanations,  mention  of  acquaintances 
among  the  proper  set  of  books,  display  of  cre 
dentials,  proofs  of  au-f ait-ness,  proofs  of  com- 
me-il-faut-ness,  rebukes  of  the  vulgar,  snubs 
103 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

for  the  illiterate,  drawings  of  "  the  line,"  in 
short  all  the  fidgets  of  the  higher  plane.  The 
most  respectably  furnished  intellects  of  our 
time  often  seem  no  more  at  home  than  Mr.  Pot- 
iphar  with  his  ormolu  and  black  walnut.  Nor 
was  Mrs.  Potiphar's  grave  concern  for  Lon 
don  liveries  and  footmen's  calves  more  typical 
of  fashionable  Society  in  that  day  than  of  the 
prolonged  colonialism  of  American  letters,  both 
in  that  day  and  in  this,  and  including  the  Poti- 
phar  Papers.  Our  books,  like  the  lives  of  our 
millionaires,  show  minds  prostrated  by  their  ac 
quisitions. 

Hence  on  reacting  some  bitter  little  book 
about  our  best  Society,  I  cannot  feel  as  supe 
rior  as  I  could  wish,  but  must  needs  be  thinking 
that  it  applies  as  well  to  a  good  many  other 
grades  and  groups,  composed  of  the  ordinary 
time-serving  sort  of  men,  and  perhaps  to  the 
author  and  perhaps  to  Cornville  and  to  me. 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

And  I  wonder  if  he  could  have  written  so  cynic 
ally  of  those  fashionable  goings-on,  had  he  at 
tended  that  last  meeting  of  the  Cornville  School 
Board,  for  though  it  is  not  wealth  or  idleness 
that  has  spoiled  us,  it  might  have  shocked 
him  all  the  more  to  see  how  spoiled  we  are. 
Those  who  satirise  some  single  group  of  us 
seem  strangely  merciful  to  all  the  rest.  Those 
bitter  persons  do  not  know  that  their  quarrel 
is  with  commonplace  or  realise  how  long  that 
quarrel  is. 

I  fancy  if  by  some  strange  chance  a  wise 
man  were  to  find  himself  amongst  us  nothing 
would  surprise  him  more  than  this  contempt 
of  us  quite  ordinary  folk  for  one  another,  class 
for  class  and  group  for  group,  the  man  of 
books  for  the  man  of  dollars,  each  strutting 
among  his  misused  opportunities,  the  humdrum 
critic  for  the  humdrum  author,  mechanical 
poets  for  mechanical  engineers,  and  the  rank 
105 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

and  file  of  stage  reformers  for  the  rank  and 
file  of  plays.  For  he  would  see  us  for  the  men 
we  are,  the  sort  that  perish  utterly  and  leave 
not  a  trace,  and  would  marvel  greatly  at  our 
imaginary  inequalities.  And  I  fancy  he  would 
drive  us  almost  mad  by  prying  into  these  dis 
tinctions  and  by  his  superstitious  talk,  appeal 
ing  to  some  demon  or  some  god  as  the  source 
of  real  distinctions,  and  to  the  need  of  some 
moonshiny  inspiration,  without  which  we  were 
merely  usual  persons  higgling  with  one  an 
other  about  the  usual  thing,  trying  to  found 
little  aristocracies  of  taste  on  grounds  of  com 
mon  failure,  spiritlessly  pretending  polite  con 
cern  in  spiritual  affairs.  And  by  the  time 
this  peering  and  Socratic  person  had  re 
duced  us  all  to  lowest  terms,  wonderfully  equal 
in  absurdity,  and  wrecked  our  intellectual  hier 
archy,  and  shown  that  there  could  not  be  any 
great  diversity  of  rank  in  our  pantisocracy  of 
106 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

middling  intellects,  we  should  be  thankful 
enough  to  the  eleven  judges  who  hurried  him 
off  to  his  hemlock.  A  fitting  end  to  his  war 
with  commonplace,  and  served  him  right,  for 
he  knew  that  it  led  to  the  kind  of  philosophy 
which  has  been  rightly  called  the  "practice  of 
death,"  and  that  if  he  would  only  keep  the 
peace,  he  too,  like  us,  might  be  "  eating  and 
drinking  in  Thessaly." 

Yet  our  scorn  of  common  things  does  seem 
rather  absurd  when  we  ourselves  are  in  no  wise 
remarkable.  And  so  do  our  attempts  to  frame 
rules  in  advance  for  artistic  greatness  or  to 
account  for  its  long  delays.  One  of  the  first 
things  a  critic  learns  from  the  manuals  of 
American  literature,  is  to  explain  the  sleepy 
state  of  our  drama  and  letters  by  their  youth. 
Such  a  young  country,  and  with  manners  so 
unformed,  such  vulgar,  rich  people,  such  un 
stable  lower  classes,  how^can  you  expect  a  work 
107 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

of  art?  We  have  dull  books  because  life  is 
empty,  and  if  now  and  then  a  fairly  good  one 
appears,  it  is  thrown  away  on  so  crude  a  sub 
ject.  Wait  till  we  cease  to  be  common,  till 
we  get  a  "  background  "  with  some  ivy  grow 
ing  on  it,  till  the  rich  are  picturesque,  and  soci 
ety  is  stratified  and  the  poor  are  in  costume 
and  know  their  place — then  it  may  be  worth 
while  for  a  genius  to  begin. 

Here  we  are,  some  of  us  totally  bald  and 
some  with  long  white  beards,  yet  all  of  us  far 
too  young  to  deserve  either  drama  or  fiction. 
There  seems  to  be  a  breed  of  critics  who  be 
lieve  in  the  utter  vulgarity  of  here  and  now, 
and  refef  every  artistic  failure  to  time,  place, 
subject,  social  conditions,  to  anything  under 
the  sun  but  the  quality  of  the  writer's  mind. 
Books  on  American  literature  are  full  of  these 
elaborate  apologies,  and  you  might  think  that 
the  brain  of  an  author  was  some  superior  kind 
108 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

of  squash  or  melon  that  could  seldom  be  raised 
here  for  lack  of  the  proper  fertiliser.  Still 
more  depressing  is  the  view  that  a  writer's  fail 
ure  is  due  to  the  material,  that  any  sort  of 
human  beings,  fashionable  or  unfashionable, 
finished  or  unfinished,  are  to  blame  for  the  writ 
er's  lack  of  interest  or  unworthy  of  "subtle 
method  and  refined  analysis  "  or  any  other  good 
thing  he  or  she  may  happen  to  have.  Why 
try  and  explain  our  "  flat  unraised  spirits  "  by 
the  ingrained  commonness  of  things  or  cheat 
the  uninspired  with  the  hope  that  had  they  a 
higher  subject  they  might  soar?  New  York 
is  not  to  blame  for  the  quality  of  the  books 
about  her.  You  might  as  well  blame  Jerusa 
lem  for  Ben  Hur. 

And  even  more  absurd,  I  think,  are  our  crit 
ical  petulance  and  shabby  excuses  on  the  sub 
ject  of  the  stage.     Surely  we  might  have  spared 
ourselves  our  solemn  trifling  about  the  Amer- 
109 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ican  drama  these  past  ten  years,  discussing 
an  art  before  the  art  emerges,  bombinating  in 
a  vacuum,  drawing  disproportionate  moral  les 
sons  from  little  foolish  things.  That  is  the 
bad  result  of  applying  artistic  and  intellectual 
standards  to  such  matters  merely  to  show  that 
you  have  them  about  you.  Later  a  sense  of 
their  irrelevancy  comes  upon  you.  They  might 
as  well  have  been  applied  to  ten  years  of  news 
paper-reading,  ten  years  of  table-talk. 

Compunctions  for  your  own  pomposity  tor 
ment  you  in  the  intervals  of  self-approval.  One 
of  the  cheats  of  the  critical  temperament  is  the 
belief  that  when  its  possessor  is  bored  there  is 
always  some  external  reason  to  account  for 
it.  The  critical  person  seldom  admits  that  his 
ennui  may  be  merely  his  own  mind's  little  do 
mestic  tragedy.  He  reasons  rather  that  it  is 
a  social  disaster,  sometimes  of  national  di 
mensions,  and  the  more  he  reflects,  the  more  he 
110 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

boils  with  public  spirit,  contrasting  the  pres 
ent  with  the  past  and  forgetting  that  the  past 
is  a  place  where  the  little  foolish  things  are  all 
forgotten. 

If  we  had  to  be  persistently  intellectual  and 
analyse  all  the  jokes  into  their  constituents;  if 
the  lines  seemed  like  an  almanac  and  the  lead 
ing  lady  a  little  vulgar  despite  her  good  looks, 
and  the  laughter  irritated  because  we  could  not 
share  it,  whose  fault  was  it?  Was  it  so  very 
different  from  the  street  or  from  any  of  those 
large  intellectually  empty  chattering-places 
wherein  men  meet  for  purposes  merely  gre 
garious?  There  at  least  remained  that  glor 
ious  sense  of  superiority.  How  delightfully 
few  of  us  there  were  and  how  many  of  them! 
Contrast  the  wit  of  Our  Flat  with  the  wit  of 
Hudibras,  let  the  keen  mind  detect  the  lack  of 
logic  in  the  plot,  compare  Charles  Lamb  with 
Mr.  Eddie  Smith,  and  be  cheerful  in  a  splendid 
111 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

isolation.  There  was  no  need  of  being  crabbed 
about  it.  One  could  scarcely  remain  a  patriot 
if  he  hated  all  fools. 

After  all,  the  lucky  man  of  the  present  is 
he  who  can  remain  cheerful  in  the  presence  of 
the  usual  thing,  when  its  only  vice  is  its  usual 
ness.  Reform  often  seems  only  the  dislike  of 
the  blase  for  the  people  with  animal  spirits. 
The  oratory  of  ennui  serves  no  purpose  what 
ever.  Ennui  is  a  matter  of  reduced  vitality  or 
of  spiritual  defeat.  It  is  a  large,  vulgar,  gar 
rulous  and  repetitious  planet,  and  the  play  is 
only  one  of  many  human  noises,  not  a  picture 
of  life,  but  an  extension  of  it  after  all,  and 
though  our  playwrights  are  not  interesting  as 
artists,  they  are  at  least  objects  of  a  reason 
able  curiosity  as  meteorologists  of  the  public 
whims.  I  wonder  if  our  warfare  with  these 
small  matters  will  hasten  much  the  coming  of 
great  things. 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Yet  I  remember  once  seeing  five  musical 
comedies  in  a  single  week,  always  with  my 
country's  good  in  mind.  It  arose  from  a  mis 
understanding  with  a  magazine.  For  some 
months  past  the  London  critics  had  been  la 
menting  the  overthrow  of  British  drama  by 
music,  horseplay  and  the  dance,  and  the  ques 
tion  arose  whether  America  was  in  like  peril. 
So  a  magazine  editor  sent  me  forth  to  see,  hav 
ing  mistaken  me  for  a  dramatic  critic.  I  was 
expected  to  find  something  to  say  that  would 
instruct  the  public,  promote  the  general  wel 
fare,  and  tend  to  the  improvement  of  the  Amer 
ican  stage.  Wrapped  in  this  earnest  purpose 
I  sat  for  five  successive  summer  evenings 
through  five  musical  comedies  that  were  in  all 
essentials  just  alike,  and  I  did  what  the  real 
dramatic  critic  usually  does  in  like  circum 
stances.  I  wrote  as  one  who  had  "  the  wel 
fare  of  the  stage  at  heart."  I  complained  that 
113 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

new  musical  comedies  were  not  really  new.  I 
compared  them  with  works  of  art  and  not  with 
the  products  of  industry.  I  had  much  to  say 
about  lack  of  originality. 

Yet  I  knew  that  like  other  large  in 
dustries  the  making  of  musical  comedies 
proceeded  on  the  principle  of  interchange 
able  parts.  There  was  no  need  of  a  new  mu 
sical  comedy.  An  old  one  refitted  with  stand 
ard  parts  was  equally  serviceable.  In  fact, 
it  is  the  purpose  of  a  musical  comedy  only  to 
seem  new  without  being  so — a  sound  business 
principle,  as  may  be  proved  at  any  time  by  a 
study  of  soaps  or  tinned  goods.  As  a  biscuit 
promoter,  for  instance,  you  would  not  aim  at 
any  large  originality  in  design  or  novelty  in 
flavour.  An  astonishing  biscuit  would  not 
serve  your  turn.  You  would  study  the  most 
successful  biscuits  that  you  knew  and  depart 
from  them  in  no  essential.  You  would  con- 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ceive  your  biscuit  with  a  chastened  fancy,  view 
ing  it  as  the  pale  flower  of  a  public  want,  not 
as  your  private  dream  of  beauly.  taking  the 
biscuit-eater  as  he  is,  not  as  he  might  be,  and 
framing  it  on  past  biscuits  tried  and  proved 
and  still  selling.  As  a  biscuit-maker  you  would 
be  self-subdued  and  un-Shakesperean,  and  your 
Butterettes  would  depart  as  little  as  possible 
from  the  highly  prosperous  Crispines,  their 
predecessor.  Your  pent-up  fancy  would  only 
emerge  when  it  came  to  advertising. 

The  question  we  ask  of  the  stage  is  only 
the  question  that  we  ask  through  life  in  this 
great  iterative  democracy,  of  books,  of  news 
papers  and  of  men — Why  the  same  thing  so 
often  ? 

On  returning  to  New  York  I  have  found  in 

this  artistic  and  literary  sameness  a  sense  of 

permanence  that  after  a  few  months'  absence 

I  always  miss  in  the  streets.     There  at  least  I 

115 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

find  assurance  that  I  shall  not  fall  behind  the 
times.  After  all,  the  minds  of  playwrights 
and  of  authors  are  among  the  few  remaining 
landmarks  on  which  New  York  may  surely 
count.  It  is  hard  enough  in  this  city  to  pre 
serve  associations  with  any  material  thing.  No 
indigenous  New  Yorker  can  revisit  anything. 
No  spirit  of  place  for  him.  He  cannot  retrace 
the  series  of  his  homes.  They  have  decayed 
into  grocer's  shops  or  shot  up  into  apartment 
houses.  His  sky-line  loses  its  teeth  even  as  he 
looks  at  it,  and  in  a  few  months  from  their  sock 
ets  enormous  fangs  protrude.  His  university 
has  zigzagged  uptown,  coquetting  in  the  side 
streets,  and  is  now  perhaps  for  a  moment  paus 
ing  somewhere  in  the  Harlem  hills.  Or  maybe 
it  is  perching  casually  on  the  top  of  some  tall 
building  with  a  Latin  sign — perstando  et  prce- 
stando  utttitati,  which  in  the  circumstances 
sounds  ironical.  His  club'  has  dodged  him  five 
116 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

times  and  swollen  beyond  all  recogniton  and 
lined  its  fat  belly  with  marbles  and  rich  mem 
bers  and  mural  decorations,  at  which  he  looks 
very  hard  and  earnestly,  hoping  perhaps  to 
fix  them  in  his  memory  before  the  house  comes 
down.  But  it  is  foolish  to  look  hard  at  any 
thing.  It  will  only  trouble  him  a  little  later 
when  he  tries  to  remember  where  he  saw  it. 
There  is  really  no  use  in  burdening  his  memory 
with  anything,  except  perhaps  two  rivers  and 
a  sky.  If  his  income  increases  and  he  wishes 
to  be  fashionable,  he  moves  northeast.  If  his 
income  increases  and  he  does  not  wish  to  be 
fashionable,  he  moves  northwest.  If  his  in 
come  remains  the  same,  he  moves  from  the 
Plantagenet  on  this  side  of  the  Elevated  Rail 
way-— which  has  raised  the  rent — to  the  Anda 
lusia  on  the  other  side — which  soon  will  raise 
it;  then  it  is  ho!  for  the  Cinderella  near  the 
water's  edge.  If  his  income  decreases- — but 
117 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

there  is  no  use  in  mentioning  that,  for  to  that 
extent  he  ceases  to  be  a  New  Yorker;  ceases, 
indeed,  to  be  anything,  fades,  loses  all  meaning 
— gets  himself  perhaps  a  little  ghosthood  in 
the  suburbs,  but  henceforth  is  never  really  any 
where,  only  on  his  way  to  it,  a  lost  spirit  of 
detachment,  mere  phantom  of  the  to  and  fro. 
In  any  case  he  moves  and  in  any  case  he  can 
not  find  the  place  he  moved  from. 

But  he  will  find  the  native  drama  precisely 
as  he  left  it.  There  is  always  the  new  American 
play.  Man  and  boy  he  has  known  it.  It  is 
one  of  his  few  old  oaken  buckets  and  ivy-cov 
ered  things.  Here  twenty  years  are  as  one  day 
and  his  neighbours  are  assuring  him  that  no 
body  has  grown  any  older.  Why  go  back  to 
the  old  farm  and  the  dried  apples  and  the  trusty 
corn-popper?  Associations  with  the  play  are 
even  earlier — full  indeed  of  a  quite  incalculable 
earliness.  New  York's  tastes  are  her  family 
antiquities  and  her  familiar  things  are  her  new 
118 


CONSTRAINED    ATTITUDES 

successes.  She  has  no  dear  old  woodshed  and 
her  hearths  are  like  the  nests  of  sparrows  on 
a  derrick,  but  she  has  new  poems,  as  good  as 
andirons,  and  new  novels,  such  as  one's  mother 
used  to  read,  and  there  is  always  a  rising  journ 
alist,  a  rising  dramatist,  painted  on  the  same 
quarter  of  the  sky.  There  are  few  spots  in  her 
plays  or  her  letters  where  one  is  not  at  home, 
almost  too  domestically.  Hence  to  allay  any 
perturbation  on  finding,  say,  after  six  months5 
absence,  Fifth  Avenue  turned  into  a  tunnel  and 
my  friends  all  gone  beyond  the  Bronx,  I  have 
merely  to  see  the  play  or  read  the  novel.  There 
is  the  genius  loci  in  all  its  golden  immaturity. 
After  all,  it  is  only  physically  and  financially 
that  New  Yorkers  buzz  along.  Our  wits  are 
at  the  old  homestead.  Therefore,  when  the 
critics  fume  as  they  do  about  our  intellectual 
condition,  let  them  at  least  for  charity's  sake 
remember  that  it  is  about  the  only  thing  to 
which  New  Yorkers  may  come  home  again. 
119 


IMPATIENT    "CULTURE"    AND 
THE    LITERAL    MIND 


VI 

IMPATIENT  "CULTURE"  AND 
THE  LITERAL  MIND 

I  HAVE  been  reading  a  gloomy  article  in  the 
Didactic  Monthly  by  a  professor  of  the  social 
sciences  who  is  sorry  he  studied  Greek.  He 
loves  it,  he  says,  but  doubts  its  "  cultural 
value  "  or  effectiveness  in  the  "  battle  of  life." 

"Would  I  trade  my  Greek,"  he  exclaims,  "considered 
both  culturally  and  practically,  for  biology,  for  zoology, 
or  for  geology,  let  alone  a  combination  (which  would  be 
a  fairer  equivalent)  of  these  or  similar  other  studies?  A 
positive  affirmative  leaps  to  the  lips." 

He  finds  that  his  teacher  fooled  him  about 
the  classics,  for  looking  back  from  his  middle 
age  he  perceives  that  Cicero  was  conceited  and 
Thucydides  left  clauses  hanging  in  the  air  in 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

a  way  that  no  magazine  editor  would  now  tol 
erate.  The  teacher  never  told  him  this,  but 
now  as  a  "  reflective  graduate  he  sees  it  and 
feels  that  he  has  been  duped." 

Of  course,  Greek  should  be  better  taught. 
Excellent  Greek  scholars,  like  eminent  econo 
mists  and  sociologists,  often  seem  strangely  ill- 
nourished  by  what  they  feed  on.  That,  indeed, 
is  a  frequent  accident  in  the  teaching  profes 
sion — the  teacher  himself  will  often  seem  much 
damaged  by  his  subject,  no  matter  what  the 
subject  is.  Educational  writers  are  always 
blaming  subjects  instead  of  men,  looking  for 
some  galvanic  theme  or  method  which  when  ap 
plied  by  a  man  without  any  gift  for  teaching 
to  a  mind  without  any  capacity  for  learning 
will  somehow  produce  intellectual  results.  It 
is  a  purely  personal  question  and  has  nothing 
to  do  with  Greek.  It  is  odd  that  anyone  should 
believe  at  this  late  date  that  any  conceivable 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

combination  of  geology,  zoology,  biology  will 
save  a  man  from  these  disasters.  They  hap 
pen  daily  at  all  points  of  the  educational  com 
pass,  in  subjects  the  most  modern  and  "  cul 
turally  "  vivacious,  genuine  "  battle-of-life " 
subjects — pedagogy,  potato  philosophies, 
courses  in  sanitary  plumbing,  slum  seminars  in 
sociology. 

"  Gentlemen,"  says  a  voice  from  the  past, 
"  to  give  the  full  force  of  the  Greek  particles, 
which  are  really  very  important — very  impor 
tant,  the  passage  should  be  rendered  thus : '  Im 
mediately  as  the  troops  advanced,  the  sun  also 
was  setting.' "  It  happens  to  come  from  the 
Greek  class-room,  but  there  are  echoes  from 
the  other  class-rooms  quite  as  absurd,  and,  now 
that  I  think  of  it,  this  dried-up  and  belated 
old  Grecian,  long  since  dead,  this  eager  and 
enthusiastic  old  gentleman  whose  spectacles 
leaped  from  his  nose  whenever  he  smelled  a  sec- 
125 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ond  aorist,  was  somehow  more  humane  and  less 
dispiriting,  had  made  his  learning  more  his 
own,  liked  it  better,  had  better  manners  in  im 
parting  it,  than  the  most  modern  and  practical 
and  pedagogically  indisputable  of  them  all. 
Greek  did  not  give  him  these  qualities;  nor 

could  the  social  sciences  have  taken  them  away. 

i 
It  merely  happened  that  he  was   the  kind  of 

man  in  whom  dead  thoughts,  whether  in  a  Greek 
grammar  or  a  government  report,  seem  to  come 
to  life  again;  whereas  there  is  no  subject  how 
ever  "vital"  that  another  sort  of  person  can 
not  easily  put  it  to  death.  Was  there  ever  a 
"burning"  question  that  could  not  be  immedi 
ately  extinguished  by  almost  any  one  at  an 
alumni  dinner  or  in  a  magazine? 

To  be  sure  the  present  state  of  my  wits  is 
far  from  satisfactory  and  there  may  have  been 
some  magical  combination,  say,  of  botany,  me 
chanical  drawing,  and  palaeontology,  some 
grouping  of  studies,  so  divinely  planned,  so 
126 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

"  culturally "  potent,  that  taken  instead  of 
Greek  would  have  raised  in  me  an  intellect  of 
unusual  size  and  agility,  a  comfort  to  myself, 
an  object  of  astonishment  to  visitors,  but  then 
again,  who  knows?  Perhaps  there  was  no 
charm  in  any  part  of  the  curriculum  that  could 
have  wrought  it;  perhaps  nature  had  some 
thing  to  say  about  it.  In  any  event,  is  it  right 
that  a  man  on  considering  his  head  in  the  forties 
should  blame  Greek  and  an  old  gentleman 
twenty  years  ago  for  the  state  of  it — write  to 
the  Didactic  Monthly  about  it,  complain  that 
it  would  have  been  a  better  head  if  other  people 
had  not  put  the  wrong  things  in  it  or  packed 
it  so  carelessly  that  some  of  the  things  slipped 
out,  or  that  it  went  by  mistake  to  a  Greek  pro 
fessor  when  it  should  have  gone  to  some  geol 
ogist?  Maybe  the  face  of  Heaven  was  set 
against  that  head  from  the  start.  Certainly 
it  makes  a  difference  to  whom  it  belongs. 
It  is  one  of  the  pleasures  of  growing  old 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

and  getting  farther  away  from  educators  that 
we  care  more  for  the  kind  of  head  and  less  for 
the  kind  of  facts  that  rain  upon  it,  distrust 
all  pedantic  educational  higgling  over  the  "  cul 
tural"  value  of  this  or  that,  doubt  the  divine 
efficacy  of  any  subject  as  a  cure  for  the  per 
sonal  vacuities,  doubt,  when  learned  Greek  meets 
scientific  Trojan,  which  of  the  twain  would  be 
the  worse  to  live  with.  And  if  a  man  has  to 
go  to  middle  age  to  find  out  that  Cicero  was 
somewhat  conceited,  Isocrates  a  trifle  pompous, 
Quintilian  rather  inclined  to  platitude,  it  may 
have  been  merely  a  private  affair,  a  secret  be 
tween  him  and  nature,  involving  no  teacher  or 
system  whatever.  For  certain  incipient  activi 
ties  may  be  expected  even  of  the  young.  Was 
the  young  man  waiting  for  artificial  respira 
tion?  If  Xenophon  was  merely  a  noun  of  the 
third  declension  who  remarked  to  some  people 
in  the  dative  plural  that  either  thalassa  or 
128 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

thalatta  was  correct,  if  Tacitus  was  only  a 
careless  Roman  who  often  dropped  his  verbs, 
obliging  some  anxious  commentator  to  pick 
them  up  in  footnotes  uttering  the  startled  cry 
of  scilicet — even  a  change  of  subject  might 
have  done  no  good,  for  the  young  mind  ap 
parently  had  not  yet  emerged. 

However,  the  literal-minded  are  they  that  in 
herit  the  earth,  and  if  Greek  literature  or  any 
other  literature  had  really  waked  up  this  man's 
fancy,  there  is  no  knowing  into  what  unsocial, 
unprofitable  dream-corner  he  might  have 
drifted,  while  progress  buzzed  past  and  prob 
lems  whistled  over  him  and  education  went  fiz 
zling  by.  He  might  have  been  a  nympholept, 
for  aught  he  knows,  instead  of  a  useful  college 
professor,  and  spent  days  in  mooning  when  he 
should  have  been  up  and  doing,  getting  on  in 
the  world,  educating,  leading  people  from  some 
place  to  some  other  place,  no  matter  whence, 
129 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

no  matter  whither,  but  leading  them.  For  it 
is  a  forlorn  and  pitiable  thing  in  a  democracy 
to  go  anywhere  without  taking  other  people — 
even  through  a  book.  Of  what  use  is  a  citizen 
whose  pleasures  are  private?  We  may  thank 
our  stars  that  we  are  born  without  imagina 
tion  in  these  days  or  if  we  start  with  a  little  of 
it  can  easily  kill  it  after  childhood.  It  would 
be,  I  think,  an  isolating  faculty  in  this  democ 
racy,  unsocial,  perhaps  unpatriotic,  a  traitor 
to  the  sovereignty  of  the  present  moment,  blind 
at  a  bargain,  useless  in  reform,  a  heretic  of 
social  values,  a  sceptic  of  the  scale  of  immedi 
ate  importance. 

An  imaginative  man  might  never  read  a  news 
paper.  He  could  so  easily  invent  more  excit 
ing  news  and  more  amusing  editors.  Imagin 
ing  success,  he  might  not  want  it.  Imagining 
people,  he  might  not  care  to  meet  them.  Why 
should  an  imaginative  man  read  a  president's 
130 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

message  or  an  opposition  editor's  remarks 
thereon,  or  hear  the  talk  of  a  club  member 
about  either?  Would  not  these  novel  and  valu 
able  forms  of  entertainment  be  staled  in  ad 
vance  to  that  accursed  and  proleptic  dreamer? 
He  might  soon  be  prefiguring  next  week's  gos 
sip  and  not  reading  it,  guessing  at  his  com 
patriots  instead  of  taking  them  by  the  hand, 
guessing  himself  so  vividly  in  and  out  of  pub- 
lice  places  that  he  would  not  wish  to  go.  Many 
affairs  of  vast  present  importance  would  not 
be  nearly  so  entrancing  as  a  good  quiet  guess 
about  them  to  an  imaginative  man.  This  is 
not  the  time  and  place  for  any  praise  of  imag 
inative  pleasures.  They  unfit  a  man  for  the 
travelled  routes  and  main  chances  of  this  democ 
racy.  They  encourage  personal  divergencies. 
They  lead  to  conduct  unbecoming  in  a  social 
unit.  They  are  neither  civic  nor  aggregative, 
but  split  a  man  from  his  race,  mass,  class  or 
131 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

group,  by  giving  him  secret  diversions  and  ab 
sent-minded  activities  for  which  not  a  penny 
will  be  paid.  They  spoil  him  for  an  active  part 
in  any  branch  of  that  great  society  for  the  pro 
motion  of  human  homogeneity  which  under  one 
name  or  another  has  been  doing  great  work 
these  many  years  in  all  parts  of  the  country 
toward  the  obliteration  of  personal  distinctions. 
Hence  it  is  better  to  read  books  as  unimag 
inatively  and  impersonally  as  possible,  think 
ing  only  of  "  results,"  of  what  may  be  turned 
to  account,  easily  communicated,  reduced  to 
summaries,  talked  about,  lectured  on.  Never 
a  private  taste  without  some  form  of  public 
demonstration,  if  you  wish  to  "get  on  in  the 
world."  And  that  is  the  safest  way  to  write 
books,  also,  for  an  imaginative  book  is  bound 
to  seem  a  queer  one.  Readers  desire  that  to 
which  they  are  accustomed.  They  are  accus 
tomed  to  memory  in  a  novelist,  also  to  great 
132 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

mimetic  skill  and  industry,  but  they  are  not 
accustomed  to  imagination.  Accordingly  they 
flee  in  large  numbers  from  such  a  book,  asking 
what  it  is  "  all  about."  That  is  one  of  the 
strange  things  about  the  literal  mind.  Why 
does  it  ask  this  question  of  books  alone?  It 
does  not  in  the  least  know  what  the  world  is 
"  driving  at,"  but  does  not  on  that  account  run 
away  from  the  world.  It  marries,  eats,  is  fond 
of  its  children,  votes,  goes  to  church,  reads 
the  newspapers,  slaughters  wild  fowl,  catches 
needless  fish,  talks  endlessly,  plays  complicated 
and  unnecessary  games,  propels  unpleasant- 
smelling  engines  at  enormous  speed  along  the 
road — all  without  looking  for  a  reason  or  being 
able  to  find  one  if  it  did.  It  is  at  any  moment 
of  the  day  an  automaton  of  custom,  irrational, 
antecedently  improbable,  no  more  able  to  give 
an  account  of  itself  than  a  bit  of  paper  swim 
ming  in  the  wind — but  put  a  fantastic  book 
133 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

before  it  and  off  goes  the  creature  indignantly 
grumbling  about  the  lack  of  an  explanation. 
As  if  the  wildest  thing  ever  written  were  half 
so  queer,  inscrutable,  fantastic  or  a  priori  in 
credible  as  the  commonest  man  that  ever  ran 
away  from  it. 

We  see  more  nowadays  of  this  queer  rage 
that  follows  literary  incomprehension  because 
there  are  so  many  more  people  who  are  trying 
to  read  and  write.  When  an  amusing  and 
fantastic  little  narrative  was  printed  in  Eng 
land  some  years  ago,  I  recall  many  stout  Brit 
ishers  who  stamped  on  it  with  their  hob-nailed 
shoes,  merely  because  it  contained  no  large 
round  meanings  like  the  London  Times  or  Mr. 
Crockett.  There  is  in  these  matters  a  sort  of 
loquacity  of  negation  as  if  every  one  who  could 
not  feel  were  bound  to  be  a  propagandist  of 
apathy.  The  literary  commentator  seems 
strangely  jealous  of  the  things  undreamt  of 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

in  his  philosophy.  He  is  eager  to  vindicate 
his  vacuum  and  the  sequel  to  his  "  I  don't  feel 
it "  is  "  Neither  do  you,"  usually  with  a  show 
of  ill-temper. 

The  theory  of  it  is  that  all  heads  are  of  the 
same  thickness  and  that  the  man  who  finds  any 
meaning  where  you  do  not  is  probably  an  im 
postor.  The  excuse  for  it  is  the  frequency  of 
fraud,  especially  in  literary  cults.  Cults  as  a 
rule  are  as  soulless  as  corporations.  One  feels, 
for  instance,  toward  certain  uncritical  lovers 
of  Mr.  Henry  James  as  Emerson  did  toward 
noisy  nature-lovers.  "  When  a  man  tells  you 
he  has  the  love  of  nature  in  his  heart,"  said 
he,  "you  may  be  sure  he  hasn't  any."  No 
one  should  be  blamed  for  being  suspicious  of 
the  literary  cult.  And  it  is  as  short-lived  as 
it  is  deceitful;  for  it  has  been  observed  of 
its  members,  as  of  the  blue-bottle  fly,  that 
they  buzz  the  loudest  just  before  they 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

drop.  Excesses  of  this  sort  have  of  late 
years  been  invariably  followed  by  periods 
of  severe  repression — of  silence  almost  pro 
portionate  to  the  degree  of  garrulity  when 
the  talking  fit  was  on.  The  hush  that 
settled  upon  Trilby  and  Robert  Elsmere 
endures  to  this  day.  The  reader  of  The  Man 
with  the  Hoe,  if  there  be  one,  is  as  the  owl  in 
the  desert;  and  upon  the  lips  of  the  Omarian 
the  spider  builds  its  web.  Men  still  find  pleas 
ure  in  the  writings  of  Stevenson,  but  where 
are  the  Stevensonians  ?  Where  are  the  Smith- 
ites,  Brownists  and  Robinsonians  of  yester 
year?  Let  a  subject  once  fall  to  the  cult,  let 
the  lavish  tongues  of  small  expounders  have 
their  way,  and  the  waters  soon  close  over  it. 

But  apart  from  this  well-founded  suspicion 

of  the  cult,  there  is  no  doubt  that  contact  with 

the  things  that  they  do  not  understand  is  to 

many    minds    acutely    disagreeable.      All    the 

136 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

greater  dramas  contain  highly  valued  passages 
which  are  not  only  wearisome  to  many  in  the 
audience  but  actually  offensive  to  them,.  A 
dog  not  only  prefers  a  customary  and  un 
pleasant  smell;  he  hates  a  good  one.  A  per 
fume  pricks  his  nose, — gives  a  wrench  to  his 
dog  nature,  perhaps  tends  to  "  undermine 
those  moral  principles "  without  which  dog 
"  society  cannot  exist,"  as  the  early  critics  used 
to  say  of  Ibsen.  Hatred  of  the  unfamiliar  is 
surely  as  common  a  rule  as  Omne  ignotum  pro 
magnifico. 

But  the  great  triumphs  of  the  literal  mind 
occur  in  the  field  of  literary  criticism,  as  when 
experts  take  the  measure  of  the  poets  or  tab 
ulate  their  parts  of  speech.  Consider,  for 
example,  the  polemics  of  literary  measurement 
to  be  found  in  almost  any  literary  magazine. 
I  never  know  which  side  to  take  in  these  dis 
cussions  as  to  what  constitutes  true  poetry  or 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

as  to  the  relative  measurements  of  bards.  This 
is  due,  I  fear,  to  gross  inaccuracy.  Parnassus 
has  never  been  for  me  ringed  with  lines  show 
ing  altitude  above  prose-level,  like  the  moun 
tains  in  the  school  geographies,  nor  have 
I  been  able  to  grade  geniuses  as  accu 
rately  as  I  could  wish.  Ranging  one  bard 
along  with  another,  old  or  new,  great  or 
small,  I  am  apt  to  miscalculate  by  many 
centimetres.  I  am  not  even  sure  of  my 
self  in  applying  the  Johnsonian  parallel  to 
present  poets  of  a  certain  degree.  I  might 
say,  for  example,  that,  if  of  Bilder's  Muse  the 
steam  pressure  is  higher,  that  of  Barman  is 
broader  in  the  beam — but  I  should  do  so  with 
little  confidence  that  it  would  survive  the  tests 
of  later  investigators. 

Hence    my    pleasure     (a    little  mixed    with 
envy)     in    many    magazine    discussions    grad 
ing    authors,    according    to    sweetness,    girth, 
138 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

weight,  height,  depth,  speed  and  durability, 
with  never  a  moment's  doubt.  Perhaps  a 
compatriot  of  Emerson  declares  he  is  en 
titled  to  the  first  rank  anywhere,  and  from 
this  position  shall  never  be  dislodged,  and  a 
London  reviewer  says  he  cannot  allow  it  be 
cause  Emerson  was  lacking  in  Je-ne-sais-quoi- 
ness,  and  lived  too  long  at  Concord,  Massachu 
setts,  and  much  as  he  hates  to  disquiet  Amer 
ica,  he  must  rate  Emerson  two  points  lower. 
Or  it  may  be  that  a  visiting  American  Pro 
fessor  in  the  course  of  his  Cambridge  lectures 
does  not  rate  the  versatility  of  Dryden  so  high 
as  it  is  rated  by  some  Oxford  don,  who  has 
scheduled  the  qualities  of  all  the  poets  and 
marked  them  on  the  scale  of  ten,  and  the  don 
turns  quickly  to  his  tables  and  finds  that  many 
of  the  Professor's  tastes  are  inexcusably  er 
roneous,  wrong  by  Troy  weight,  wrong  by 
avoirdupois,  and  that  they  are  not  always  ex- 
139 


UNIVERSITY 

OF 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

pressed  in  donnish  language,  several  phrases 
being  merely  suggestive  and  three  prepositions 
misplaced.  So  on  this  firm  basis  he  proves  the 
lecturer  illiterate  and  shallow-pated,  and  then 
with  wider  sweep  (for  he  happens  to  be  writ 
ing  in  the  London  Bombardinian,  whose  policy 
it  is  to  insult  America  as  no  grand  division  of 
the  earth's  surface  has  ever  been  insulted  be 
fore)  he  dismisses  all  American  scholarship  as 
quite  worthless  and  American. 

Or,  again,  it  may  be  that  Mr.  Barker 
(one  of  those  rare  expository  poets,  who 
after  the  printing1  of  a  poem  can  live 
handsomely  for  several  years  on  the  in 
come  of  their  explanations),  appears  once 
more  in  a  magazine,  and  the  question  immedi 
ately  arises,  Is  it  a  deathless  song?  And  one 
maintains  that  Mr.  Barker  is  the  true  bobo 
link  singing  with  his  breast  against  a  thorn, 
and  another  disproves  it  by  citing  two  or  three 
140 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

mixed  metaphors  or  lines  that  he  cannot  under 
stand. 

"The  great  white  peak  of  my  soul  has  spoken" 
"To  the  depths  of  my  being  below." 

"How  can  a  peak  speak?  "  says  the  foe  of 
Barker,  but  a  man  from  the  poets'  ranks  fells 
him  with  the  Bible.  "  Why  hop  ye  so,  ye  high 
hills?"  says  the  Bible,  and  how  can  a  "high 
hill  hop  ? "  And  on  they  go,  each  deciding 
the  thing  absolutely  and  trying  to  bind  the 
rest,  and  Mr.  Barker  waits  cheerfully,  know 
ing  that  his  time  will  surely  come,  and  mean 
while  plans  lecture  tours  along  all  the  prin 
cipal  trade  routes  of  the  country.  I  may  not 
address  myself  to  these  grave  issues  in  the 
clarion  tones  that  they  deserve,  but  I  appre 
ciate  the  spirit  of  such  discussions  and  like  to 
see  them  going  on. 

Or  suppose  the  great  question  of  "  English 
141 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

style  "  reappears  in  the  magazines.  A  sentinel 
of  "  Culture "  has  been  found  asleep ;  a  pro 
fessor  of  English  literature  in  a  book  on  rhet 
oric  for  the  young  has  himself  been  quite  in 
elegant.  Thrice  has  he  ended  a  sentence  with 
the  careless  words  "  and  so  on,"  and  on  one 
page  he  has  referred  coarsely  to  "  the  business 
in  hand"  and  on  another  he  has  said  he 
"  pitched  upon  a  word," — as  if  a  gentleman 
would  ever  pitch  on  anything;  it  is  the  act  of 
a  drunkard  or  a  ship.  And  thereupon  some 
one  all  aglow  with  true  refinement  asks  what 
our  native  language  will  become  if  men  in  such 
high  station  fall  into  blunders  gross  as  these. 
And  the  blunders  are  then  pilloried  in  italics  or 
marched  to  jail  behind  exclamation  points, 
looking  very  guilty  indeed,  and  the  newspapers 
copy,  and  editorial  writers,  straining  to  sud 
den  dignity  of  phrase,  comment  on  it  with  a 
splendid  scorn.  Finally,  if  the  weather  is 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

warm,  "  Typicus  "  and  "  Philologus  "  write  let 
ters  ending  either  with  "  Quis  custodes  custo- 
diet "  or  with  "  Verbum  sat,"  and  others  fol 
low,  and  all  concerned  are  soon  debating 
whether  you  can  be  a  perfect  gentleman  and 
end  a  sentence  with  a  prepositon.  It  is  a  scene 
of  great  and  cheerful  activity,  and  no  man  with 
his  heart  in  the  right  place  will  begrudge  the 
participants  any  of  their  joy. 

Yet  it  puzzles  us  simpler  folk,  who  did 
not  know  that  even  the  best  of  grammar 
could  really  save  an  "English  style." 
For  it  is  astonishing  how  vicious  an  "Eng 
lish  style"  may  be  without  getting  into 
the  grammatical  police  court.  And  the 
man  who  writes  about  it  at  the  great 
est  length  on  this  occasion  seems  not  to  have 
attained  it  though  he  breaks  no  laws.  The 
sentences  are  willing  to  parse  for  him,  but  that 
is  all.  They  deny  all  complicity  with  his  mind* 
143 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

all  ease,  intimacy  and  sense  of  form;  call  up 
no  image  and  suggest  no  thought ;  do  nothing, 
in  short,  that  might  distinguish  him  from  the 
Comptroller  of  the  Mint,  the  Board  of  Educa 
tion,  a  Consular  Report,  or  the  Turveydrop 
on  the  morning  newspaper  who  took  his  treatise 
as  a  text  for  a  lecture  on  literary  deportment. 
Of  course  this  is  no  fault  of  his,  but  in  the  ca 
pricious  region  of  "  English  style  "  the  person 
ally  blameless  seem  often  to  be  the  deepest 
damned.  We  forgive  some  men  sooner  for 
breaking  the  law  than  others  for  breaking  the 
silence;  and  there  is  something  about  these 
staunch  upholders  of  the  law  that  drives  all 
uncouth  persons,  like  myself,  to  mad  excesses. 
We  rush  into  some  lonely  shed  and  split  in 
finitives. 

And  of  what  use  is  it  to  attack  one  Dr.  Dry- 
bosh,  as  a  daily  paper  did,  because  he  wrote 
six  hundred  pages  on  Tennyson's  diction  and 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

arranged  the  poet's  idioms  in  classes  and  sub 
classes  and  convicted  his  co-ordinate  clauses  of 
illicit  intercourse?  Dr.  Drybosh  is  a  mere  pupil 
of  the  Drier  Criticism,  of  which  sad  science 
masters  are  to  be  found  everywhere,  not  only 
in  college  chairs  of  literature,  but  in  newspa 
pers,  magazines,  reading  circles  and  women's 
clubs.  Few  people  read  a  poet  nowadays. 
They  take  a  course  in  him.  Some  one  arranges 
him  first  into  an  early,  a  middle  and  a  later 
period.  Somebody  builds  an  approach  to  his 
"  works "  and  somebody  else  a  trestle  over 
them.  A  Dr.  Dowden  may  perhaps  be  found 
who  will  show  how  the  buoyant  tone  of  the 
poet's  youth  was  tempered  by  the  reflective  note 
of  his  middle  age.  Then  there  is  his  relation 
to  his  time  and  to  other  times  and  the  pedi 
gree  of  his  main  idea  and  whether  poetry  had 
ever  broken  out  in  the  family  before,  and,  if 
so,  why,  and  his  likeness  to  somebody  and  un- 
145 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

likeness  to  somebody  else,  and  the  list  of  his 
ingredients,  and  how  long  they  had  to  be 
stirred,  and  when  they  actually  "  came  to  a 
boil,"  and  what  his  place  was  in  literature. 

True,  Drybosh  is  a  type  much  loved  by  col 
lege  presidents,  and  rewarded  usually  with  a 
Ph.  D.  (no  mere  ornamental  appendage,  but 
the  indispensable  prehensile  tail  for  academic 
climbing),  and  often  promoted  to  a  special  lit 
erary  chair  for  dehumanising  the  humanities. 
But  to  be  a  Drier  Critic,  whether  of  the  college 
chair  or  not,  that  is  the  best  way  to  begin,  and 
the  Drier  Criticism  is  at  this  day  inexpugnable. 
For  by  means  of  it  a  man  who  has  no  heart 
for  his  subject  may  still  draw  from  it  his  daily 
bread.  Commensalism  is  by  no  means  limited 
to  bivalves,  but  runs  all  through  the  Drier  Crit 
icism.  Shakespeare  to  his  commentators  is  as 
the  oyster  to  the  oyster  crab.  The  very  defi 
nition  of  commensalism  reminds  one  of  the 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

latest  essay  on  Browning  or  Walt  Whitman; 
and  why  rebuke  the  manners  of  invertebrates, 
whether  literary  or  marine?  In  all  these  mat 
ters  one  should  strive  for  a  more  than  human, 
an  almost  zoological,  charity,  and  the  hope 
that  even  a  Ph.  D.  may  have  its  use  in  nature. 
Hundreds  of  naturally  book-shy  people,  dis 
liking  the  essentials  of  literature,  are  kept  busy 
in  its  neighbourhood  by  just  such  tinker- work 
in  its  non-essentials;  or  they  may  at  least  be 
made  to  tarry  near  by  papers  on  the  "  human 
side"  of  him,  how  the  great  man  looked, 
wherewithal  he  was  clothed,  whence  his 
thoughts  came,  and  what  he  ate.  I  have 
before  me  a  "  Chat  with  an  Author,"  pro 
fusely  illustrated,  and  taking  up  the  best 
part  of  a  page  of  a  newspaper.  In 
the  upper  left-hand  corner  is  the  author's  full 
face.  At  a  distance  of  two  inches  to  the  right 
is  his  profile,  the  intervening  space  being  filled 
147 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

by  a  picture  of  a  rose  from  the  author's  gar 
den.  In  the  lower  left-hand  corner  is  the 
author's  front  door.  In  the  middle  is  a  larger 
picture  of  the  author,  this  time  including  his 
legs  and  the  library  table.  In  the  right-hand 
corner  is  the  library  table  again,  but  this  time 
without  the  author,  and  below  the  library  table 
may  be  seen  an  elm-tree  belonging  to  the  au 
thor.  These  are  not  the  mementoes  of  the  dead. 
The  author  is  still  living.  The  "  chat "  itself 
abounds  in  the  same  reverent  miscellany.  The 
author  declares  his  preference  for  high  ideals 
as  opposed  to  low  ones,  and  the  interviewer 
jots  it  down.  He  breathes,  and  the  interviewer 
notes  it.  A  similar  "  chat "  follows  with  an 
other  author,  also  "  in  the  public  eye,"  who 
supplies  three  portraits  and  maintains  with 
equal  firmness  that  high  ideals  ought  to  be 
raised  and  their  seeds  freely  distributed.  And 
so  it  goes.  Scores  of  these  literary  interviews 
148 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

were  appearing  at  that  time,  some  papers  mak 
ing  them  a  regular  feature  of  Sunday  or  Sat 
urday  supplements.  They  were  studies  in  ef 
faced  personality.  Not  a  tumultuous  or  self- 
willed  person  at  any  time,  the  American  author 
on  these  occasions  faded  completely  away.  He 
seemed  a  jelly-fish  floating  on  the  current  of 
universal  assent  and  owing  his  success,  one 
would  say  from  his  remarks,  not  to  any  efforts 
of  his  own  but  to  the  country's  willingness.  It 
may  have  been  the  fault  of  the  interviewer  that 
he  could  detect  in  these  authors  only  the  qual 
ities  that  are  common  to  the  race,  and  record 
only  those  sentiments  which  it  would  be  a  sin 
for  mankind  not  to  share.  But  I  remember 

that  one  of  them  was  made  to  say: 

"  The  atmosphere  in  which  ideals  are  found  must  be 
preserved  to  insure  their  accuracy,  and  atmosphere  is 
the  divine  promise  of  ideals  that  the  true  artist  finds 
wrapped  around  an  otherwise  sordid  fact." 

And  the  other  interviews  abounded  in  just 
149 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

such  comatose  passages.  Perhaps  it  was  due 
to  the  benumbing  effect  of  publicity.  Just  as 
many  animals  will  not  touch  their  food  in  the 
presence  of  man,  so  there  may  be  authors  who 
will  not  use  their  minds  if  they  think  anybody 
is  watching  them.  Excited  by  the  camera,  and 
unmanned  by  the  sense  of  impending  advertise 
ment,  they  are  on  these  occasions  not  them 
selves,  often  utterly  swooning  away  into  the 
general  morality.  Later,  perhaps,  they  find 
they  have  been  saying  that  the  world  on  the 
whole  is  growing  better  every  day,  or  if  it  is 
not  it  ought  to  be,  and  that  they  do  their  best 
literary  work  between  meals  and  with  an  ear 
nest  purpose,  and  that  this  is  a  great  country, 
and  culture  club's  are  dotting  the  prairies,  and 
the  atmosphere  is  full  of  ideals,  plenty  for 
everybody,  so  give  the  baby  one.  Which  invol 
untary  remarks,  subjoining  a  scene  of  pillage, 
wherein  their  profiles,  full  faces  and  frock  coats 
DL50 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

alternate  with  chairs,  desks,  tables,  detached 
doors,  bulrushes,  twigs  and  other  objects  torn 
from  the  premises,  constitute  what  is  known  as 
a  literary  "  chat "  published  for  the  benefit  of 
persons  who  might  have  taken  grave  offence  at 
anything  more  intimately  literary. 

Apparently  one  of  the  chief  objects  of  writ 
ing  about  books  to-day  is  to  entice  these  alien 
and  reluctant  souls  into  their  vicinity  and  to 
comfort  the  aching  hearts  of  "  Culture  "- 
seekers  with  the  sense  that  "  Culture  "  has  been 
attained.  Readers  are  seized  in  the  midst  of 
their  reading  with  a  mad  Chautalkative  phil 
anthropy,  and  disdaining  their  own  digestions, 
tell  us  what  to  read.  I  am  constantly  receiving 
advice  as  to  my  book  consumption  from  people 
who  look  starved.  "  Culture  "  is  always  preoc 
cupied  with  my  conversion.  There  are  writers 
for  the  London  Bombard&nian  who  have  never 
read  a  line  except  for  the  discipline  of  me.  In 
151 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

my  own  country  there  is  the  literature  of  the 
helping  hand,  more  active  than  the  Salvation 
Army.  Unselfish  men  running  back  and  forth 
all  their  lives  between  their  books  and  me;  de 
voted  women  telling  me  how  to  approach  poets 
who  are  by  no  means  fugitive;  engines  of  liter 
ary  "  uplift,"  ably  manned  or  womaned,  from 
heavy,  hoisting,  academic  derrick  to  smoothest 
of  ladies'  escalators ;  societies  formed  to 
make  me  feel  as  if  I  had  read  what  I  have  not ; 
road  houses  on  the  way  to  every  well-known 
author  for  the  pilgrims  who  never  arrive.  In 
England  the  duty  which  the  man  who  has  read 
something  owes  to  the  man  who  has  not  is 
tinged,  to  be  sure,  with  a  certain  sternness. 
The  Briton  with  a  bit  of  literary  knowledge  in 
him  makes  it  a  class  distinction,  accentuating 
the  ignominy  of  the  man  who  has  it  not,  point 
ing  more  unmercifully  than  we  do  to  the  horrid 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

gap  between  them — but  always  for  that  vulgar 
person's  good.  With  us  there  are  more  who 
lend  a  hand  or  smooth  the  pillow.  But  com 
mon  to  this  abounding  helpfulness  is  the  ten 
dency  to  begin  too  soon.  Too  soon  does  the 
thought  of  others  extrude  all  other  thoughts. 
Too  early  and  devotedly  do  readers  plunge  into 
the  care  of  all  minds  but  their  own.  The  self- 
indulgent  partaker  is  rare;  the  toil-spent,  lit 
eral-minded,  ill-nourished,  eleemosynary  book- 
executive  or  taste-commissioner  is  almost  the 
rule. 

I  forbear  to  add  any  reflections  of  my  own  to 
the  vast  body  of  expository  or  satiric  comment 
on  this  familiar  democratic  tendency,  but  I  do 
protest  against  the  view  that  even  the  most 
solemn  of  these  missionaries  are  people  who 
take  themselves  in  the  least  seriously.  There 
is  no  point  in  the  common  gibe  about  taking 
153 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

one's  self  too  seriously.  These  people  are  swept 
away  from  themselves  on  waves  of  premature 
benevolence.  In  a  humanitarian  era  they  are 
clean  gone  into  other-mindedness,  having  no 
private  tastes,  only  ministerial  inclinations,  no 
personal  pleasures,  only  social  subsidiary  utili 
ties.  These  are  not  the  cares  of  your  self-seri 
ous  person.  The  more  seriously  he  took  him 
self,  the  more  lightly  would  he  be  apt  to  take 
the  duties  of  this  literary  motherhood.  He 
would  leave  us  to  make  our  way  as  best  we 
might  into  Meredith  or  toward  Dante  or  under 
Shakespeare  or  around  Browning.  No  sign 
posts  from  him,  or  guide-books,  pathfinders, 
step-ladders,  "  aspects,"  "  appreciations,"  cen 
tral  thoughts,  dominant  notes,  real  messages, 
helps  to,  peeps  at,  or  glimpses  of;  in  short, 
none  of  the  apparatus  of  literary  approach, 
and  none  of  the  devices  for  getting  done  with 
154 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

authors.  For  what  should  he  care — that  seri 
ously-selfish  man — about  our  propinquities  and 
juxtapositions,  our  first  views  and  early  totter- 
ings?  Sauve  qui  pent  would  be  his  feeling  in 
these  matters,  coupled  with  no  especial  unwill 
ingness  to  see  us  hanged. 

A  foolish  phrase,  that  of  taking  one's  self 
too  seriously,  and  doubly  so  when  applied  to 
writers,  accusing  them,  as  it  does,  of  quite  in* 
credible  excesses — thinking  too  long,  feeling 
too  keenly,  enjoying  too  heartily,  living  too 
much.  And,  as  is  well  known,  true  literature  is 
compact  of  very  lordly  egotisms,  the  work  of 
men  preoccupied  with  self-delight.  Never  a 
philosopher  without  his  own  first  egotistic  cer 
tainties,  or  a  poet  who  was  not  the  first  adorer 
of  his  dreams,  or  a  humorist  whose  own  earliest 
and  private  laughter  was  not  the  nearest  to  his 
heart.  Never  a  good  fisher  of  men  in  these 
155 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

waters  who  had  not  first  landed  himself,  taken 
himself  so  very  seriously  that  we  cannot  mis 
take  him  for  anybody  else,  maintained  his  ego 
tism  in  a  masterpiece — that  most  unblushing, 
self-interested  device  ever  yet  achieved  for  the 
preservation  of  personal  identity. 


156 


LITERARY      CLASS      DISTINCTIONS 


vn 

LITERARY    CLASS     DISTINCTIONS 

As  a  reader  of  current  literary  comment  I  have 
often  wondered  why  professional  writers  about 
books  love  so  dearly  to  snub  one  another  and 
me.  I  do  not  refer  to  mere  phraseological 
heirlooms  from  a  pompous  and  didactic  past,  as 
when  it  is  said  that  "  every  schoolboy  knows  " 
something  that  the  writer  has  but  recently  as 
certained,  or  when  the  results  of  much  grub 
bing  on  his  part  are  introduced  as  "  doubtless 
familiar  to  the  reader."  I  refer  to  the  practice 
of  sniffing  at  a  class  of  people  whom  he  rates 
very  much  beneath  him — people  on  whom  the 
"  subtle  something "  in  B's  writings  is  quite 
thrown  away,  or  who  miss  the  "  undercurrent 
of  philosophy  "  in  C's  humour,  or  who  for  some 
159 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

vile  canine  reason  prefer  D  to  F.  "  No  better 
touchstone  of  literary  taste  could  be  con 
ceived,"  says  Porphyrogenitus,  "  than  ability 
to  appreciate  the  following  passage,"  and  find 
ing  the  passage  spiritless  and  altogether  medi 
ocre  I  learn  that  I  am  of  the  canaille,  and  so 
would  scores  of  his  fellow-writers  if  all  of  them 
had  not  "  touchstones  "  of  their  own  whereby 
they  in  turn  become  Vere  de  Veres,  banishing 
him  to  the  butler's  pantry.  And  the  more  re 
spectable  and  British  the  periodical,  the  more 
hopeless  the  lot  of  the  outsider,  the  blacker  the 
unparochial  outer  darkness.  Nowhere  has  the 
Proper  Thing  more  awful  beadles  than  in  the 
unsigned  pages  devoted  to  "light  litera 
ture  "  in  the  British  magazines.  For  each  is 
proud  not  only  of  what  he  does  know,  but 
of  not  knowing  any  more — scienter  nes- 
ciens,  sapient er  indoctus,  like  the  monk  of 
old,  or  like  Carlyle's  gigman,  if  you  pre- 
160 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

fer.  I  am  always  abashed  before  the 
British  paragrapher,  even  when  he  speaks 
kindly  of  Poe  or  Walt  Whitman  or  tells 
me  Mark  Twain  is  a  genuine  humorist.  Amer 
ica  lies  so  largely  outside  his  experience  and  it 
is  so  clearly  her  fault  and  he  is  so  grandly  mer 
ciful  to  people  who  did  not  know  they  needed 
any  mercy,  and  he  is  so  very  like  one  of  his 
country's  institutions  and  so  very  unlike  a  fel 
low-man. 

"  It  would  be  churlish  to  deny,"  said  an  edi 
torial  writer  for  the  London  Bombardinian  at 
the  end  of  a  severe  rebuke  of  American  taste  in 
novels — « jt  would  be  churlish  to  deny  that 
America  has  produced  great  writers  who  can 
hold  their  own  with  any  European  or  Asiatic." 
Why  "churlish,"  I  wonder,  and  to  whom?  Is 
the  country,  then,  so  tender  or  the  writer  so 
Olympian  that  the  cruel  words  must  be  with 
held  for  fear  of  crushing?  Would  they  not  be 
161 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

the  words  of  a  simple,  harmless,  unknown,  pers 
piring  man  with  space  to  fill  and  possibly  a 
printer's  devil  waiting  and  ideas  hanging  back 
and  no  means  of  making  sure  of  anything  under 
the  sun  and  only  some  haphazard  personal 
tastes  and  private  guesses  to  rely  upon?  Why, 
then,  that  Atlantean  manner,  as  if  responsible 
to  the  man  in  the  moon  for  letting  the  world 
slip? 

Surely  readers  must  understand  the  situation. 
There  is  nothing  papal  about  that  well-worn 
editorial  chair  wherein  he  wriggles,  nor  is  he 
by  any  magic  transformed  into  an  oecumenical 
council,  vox  populi,  enlightened  public  opinion, 
consensus  of  the  learned,  fourth  estate,  moral 
bulwark,  or  anything  else  more  representative 
or  apostolic  or  numerous  than  a  man  with  a 
pen  and  an  ink-pot.  Nowhere,  it  would  seem, 
could  a  literary  opinion  be  expressed  with  less 
concern  for  the  susceptibilities  of  nations  than 
162 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

in  the  unsigned  pages  of  a  British  magazine. 
Yet  nowhere  do  words  imply  a  more  awful 
sense  of  their  own  consequences.  I  presume  a 
man  is  actually  not  committing  his  publishers, 
his  family  and  friends,  his  country's  institu 
tions  and  her  flag  any  more  deeply  by  express 
ing  an  opinion  in  the  pages  of  a  British  maga 
zine  than  in  the  pages  of  an  American  book. 
Yet  here  am  I  quite  free  and  unconscionable 
toward  any  poets  or  prose  writers  on  the  face 
of  the  globe.  It  is  not  out  of  kindness  that  I 
spare  French  literature,  and  I  would  as  lief  be 
churlish  as  not  to  the  literatures  of  England, 
Spain,  Germany,  the  age  of  Pericles,  any  coun 
try  or  any  period,  and  may  frankly  tell  them 
the  sweet  or  bitter  truth — I  like  them,  I  like 
them  not.  When  I  reprove  a  country's  litera 
ture  that  country  seems  to  know  by  instinct 
that  it  is  not  her  fault.  Mid-Victorian  Brit 
ish  poets,  post-Lincoln  American  poetasters, 
163 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Greeks,  Romans,  Scandinavians,  whoever  they 
may  be,  they  ask  no  mercy  from  my  powerful 
though  undistinguished  pen.  Are  they  really 
in  any  greater  fear  of  British  weekliness? 

But  this  approaches  the  character  of  Pods- 
nap,  and  the  actual,  full-fledged  British  Pods- 
nap,  as  you  sometimes  find  him  in  the  maga 
zines,  is  a  creature  to  be  prized.  I  always  clip 
and  preserve  his  sayings,  having  something  of 
a  collector's  mania  for  good  specimens  of  the 
breed.  Here  is  one  that  I  have  treasured: 

"We  question  whether  the  time  is  not  now  rapidly 
approaching  when  it  will  be  necessary  for  all  sane  and 
orthodox  people  to  inquire  of  any  new  person  that  may 
be  brought  to  their  notice,  *  Are  you  a  Socialist  or  an 
Atheist?  *  and  in  the  event  of  an  answer  being  given 
in  the  affirmative  to1  express  extreme  regret  at  being 
unable  to  go  any  further  with  the  acquaintance." 

Taking    absurdity    for    absurdity,    I    never 
could  see  why  the  highly  prized  British  types 
in  comedy  and  satiric  fiction  were  any  more 
164 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

valuable  than  many  of  these  actual  contribu 
tors  to  decorous  British  periodicals,  for  exam 
ple,  the  Hart  at  or  or  the  Bombardinian.  And 
what  are  they  for,  if  not  for  the  pleasure  of  a 
distant  people?  At  home  custom  no  doubt 
stales  their  exquisite  pomposity.  Probably  the 
native  Briton,  subdued  as  he  is  to  the  respect 
able  tradition,  takes  it  as  a  matter  of  course 
that  there  should  be  scores  of  these  anonymous 
beings  episcopating  in  an  ink-pot,  binding  and 
loosing,  delimiting  the  mind's  permissible  ac 
tivities,  dividing  the  earth  by  meridians  of  pro 
priety,  puffing  up  at  the  touch  of  an  alien 
thought  like  a  balloon-fish  out  of  water  when 
you  tickle  him.  But  in  the  more  inquisitive 
soil  of  this  country  those  large  incurious  Pods- 
naps  will  not  grow — not,  at  least,  the  best  of 
them,  the  genuine,  full-bodied,  calm,  thought- 
proof,  opinion-tight  British  ones. 

I  can  no  longer  regard,  said  a  recent  writer 
165 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

for  the  Bombardmian,  I  can  no  longer  regard 
the  Antipodes  as  a  hopeful  portion  of  the 
earth's  surface.  And  there  the  matter  rests. 
We  shall  never  know  what  passed  between  him 
and  the  Antipodes — whether  the  Antipodes 
were  wicked  or  merely  careless,  whether  it  was 
deliberate  and  personal  or  something  impulsive 
and  Polynesian,  "  so  unlike  the  home  life  of  our 
dear  Queen."  We  know  only  that  nothing 
henceforth  shall  pass  between  them.  The  ac 
quaintance  is  at  end.  And  again : 

"  We  have  been  taken  to  task  for  saying  that  Amer 
ica  was  no  more  civilised  than  Japan." 

And  then,  staunch  old  Podsnap  that  he  is,  he 
puts  his  foot  down  and  says  it  again,  and  so 
settles  the  matter.  Germany's  turn  next,  and 
the  Orient  and  the  Tropic  of  Cancer  and  cer 
tain  tribal  doings  of  Africa,  very  ungentle- 
manly  to  say  the  least.  No  nonsense  about 
Podsnap.  He  is  not  the  man  to  shilly-shally 
166 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

with  a  hemisphere,  and  he  does  not  mince  his 
words.  But  if  a  continent  behaves  properly, 
Podsnap  is  willing  to  admit  it.  He  is  not  nar 
row-minded,  only  firm.  If,  as  Dickens  said, 
Podsnap  once  disapproved  of  Asia,  Asia  at  that 
time  gave  him  cause,  and  since  then  he  has  had 
occasion  to  speak  kindly  of  Asia  several  times. 
When  Asia  makes  an  honest  effort  to  please 
Podsnap  she  is  not  repulsed.  Asia  under  re 
spectable  institutions — House  of  Lords,  Lon 
don  County  Council — would  find  Podsnap 
ready  to  let  bygones  be  bygones.  He  would 
do  as  much  for  America,  though  for  the  pres 
ent  he  has  dismissed  her.  Podsnap  will  forgive 
any  grand  division  of  the  earth's  surface  that 
is  truly  sorry. 

And  who  are  these  people  that  take  Podsnap 

to  task  and  would  strip  him  of  his  opinions? 

If  they  are  Americans,  as  some  of  them  profess 

to  be,  they  are  disloyal  to  the  spirit  of  their 

167 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

country.     The  land  that  restores  a  diplodocus, 

that  would  have  liked  to  purchase  Stonehenge, 
that  actually  imports  Rameses  and  pays  al 
most  any  price  for  an  historic  background,  no 
matter  whose ;  the  country  where  few  can  afford 
to  keep  their  own  rattletraps  so  highly  are  they 
rated  as  bijouterie,  where  the  keepsake  is  kept 
by  some  other  family,  and  the  soap-boilers  of 
one  generation  become  the  vases  of  the  next 
and  the  warming-pans  its  mantelpiece  orna 
ments  ;  the  land  whose  young  women  may  be 
seen  at  any  time  in  ancient  foreign  cities  ejacu 
lating  "  Quaint "  much  as  the  duck  quacks  and 
telling  the  natives  they  are  "  dear  old  things," 
will  always  resent  a  retort  upon  Podsnap.  For 
it  is  prompted  by  the  desire  to  change  him,  and 
although  that,  luckily,  is  impossible,  the  wish 
to  do  so  is  none  the  less  base.  To  remove  an 
opinion  from  a  certain  type  of  Englishman 
would  be  an  act  of  vandalism. 
168 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

For  the  truth  is,  Podsnap,  outside  the  printed 
page,  is  growing  rare,  which  enhances  his  value 
to  all  who  love  to  meet  the  things  they  found 
in  Mid-Victorian  novels.  The  crumpets  are 
what  they  were;  so  is  the  ale;  so  is  a  cabman; 
but  a  man  may  traverse  the  length  and  breadth 
of  the  British  Isles  and  never  meet  a  genuine 
Podsnap.  Indeed,  the  traveller  brings  back 
tales  of  a  careless  openness  of  mind  utterly 
alien  to  Podsnap.  Everywhere  outside  print 
are  the  signs  of  slackened  fibre  and  a  surface 
glitter  of  decay  in  the  manhood  that  was  Pod- 
snap's.  Even  in  print  there  are  only  a  few 
publications  to  which  the  alien  may  turn  with 
a  reasonable  chance  of  finding  an  absolute 
Podsnap.  All  the  rest  are  honeycombed  with 
knowledge  and  tainted  with  new-fangled  rela 
tive  views  of  things. 

But  this,  I  fear,  is  digressive.  To  return  to 
more  purely  literary  class  distinctions:  Even 
169 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

when  by  accident  my  tastes  are  momentarily  in 
accord  with  some  writer  for  the  Bombardinian, 
I  cannot  help  feeling  for  the  others,  those  vul 
gar  others,  "  half-educated,"  "  bourgeois," 
"  suburban,"  who,  say  what  you  will,  must 
somehow  be  aware  of  their  condition,  and  suffer 
keenly.  But  it  is  given  to  no  man  to  remain 
long  among  "Discriminating  Readers."  Suc 
cessive  writers  hew  them  down,  till,  if  you  fol 
low  literary  journalism  far  enough,  not  one 
soul  is  left  to  blush  at  the  tale  of  his  own  ex- 
clusiveness.  It  comes  to  the  same  anarchy  in 
the  end,  not  only  among  the  frank  literary  ego 
tists,  men  of  "  confessions,"  men  of  "  para 
dox,"  but  among  the  severest  academic  persons 
full  of  grave  discourse  about  the  "  best  literary 
traditions,"  recognised  standards  and  the  like, 
speaking  apparently  for  a  class,  yet  each  using 
his  scale  of  values  as  a  personal  step-ladder  to 
overtop  the  next.  "In  his  treatment  of  Na- 
170 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ture,"  says  the  Literary  Palladium,  speaking* 
of  some  undistinguishable  person,  "  a  prosaic 
thoroughness  mars  artistic  effect."  "  As  a 
matter  of  fact,"  retorts  the  Weekly  TChada- 
manthus,  "  precisely  the  opposite  is  true :  A 
poetic  thoroughness  heightens  artistic  effect." 
And  so  it  goes.  Nor  is  it  a  merely  rhetorical 
certainty.  These  strange  creatures  really  feel 
all  the  absoluteness  of  pure  mathematics  or  of 
childhood — and  in  regard  to  matters  which  in 
the  long  run  will  be  ranged  with  millinery  and 
waistcoat  buttons. 

The  outskirts  of  literature,  like  the  fringe 
of  "  our  best  Society,"  are  full  of  these  queer 
meticulous  beings,  concerned  with  Heaven 
knows  what  pass-words  and  cachets  and  easily 
horrified  little  gentilities — anxious  debaters  of 
what's  what  and  who's  who,  and  the  minutise 
of  precedence  and  the  things  one  ought  to  seem 
to  know  and  the  ins  and  outs  of  literary  table 
171 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

manners.  And  the  man  who  sips  Walter  Pater 
in  old  china  must  on  no  account  be  seen  with  the 
man  who  eats  raw  Kipling  with  a  knife.  And 
in  the  absence  of  any  personal  distinction  there 
is  this  awful  sense  of  class  distinctions,  con 
veyed  in  many  shrugs  and  shudders  and  little 
screams;  and  books  are  neither  loved  nor 
hated;  and  "  Culture"  must  declare  itself  or  it 
would  never  be  suspected;  and  you  guess  that 
a  man  is  fully  educated,  because  he  calls  some 
other  man  "  half-educated  "  and  seems  to  think 
it  a  very  dreadful  thing ;  and  vulgarity  is  not  a 
quality  of  the  mind  but  a  degree  of  literary 
information;  and  were  it  not  for  the  exclama 
tory  derision  for  the  "  half-baked  "  on  the  part 
of  gentlemen  who,  presumably,  are  completely 
baked,  I  defy  you  to  tell  the  difference.  Such 
are  the  higher  planes  to-day  of  literary  jour 
nalism,  whence  come  the  warnings  to  us  sordid 
folk  below,  and  the  vulgar  rich  look  up  and 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

turn  away  again  (small  blame  to  them)  and 
build  still  larger  soap-boxes  on  the  green,  and 
the  "  tired  business-man "  with  averted  eyes 
flees  faster  to  the  roof-garden,  and  Western 
colleges  add  new  schools  of  dentistry  with  funds 
diverted  from  the  "  liberal  arts  " — and  I  am  go 
ing  to  buy  a  paper  collar  and  learn  to  chew 
tobacco  if  I  can.  Such  "  true  refinement " 
would  certainly  be  an  appalling  thing  to  have 
happen  to  one. 

Why  has  no  Anglo-Saxon  writer  taken  the 
hint  from  M.  Lemaitre's  little  paper  on  le 
snobbisme  litteraire  and  carried  the  idea  fur 
ther?  M.  Lemaitre,  of  course,  faltered  miser 
ably,  for  what  could  a  Frenchman  know  of 
anything  so  intimately  ours  as  le  snobbisme 
litteraire?  It  is  unfair  to  call  it  as  some  do  an 
"  academic  "  quality,  thus  debasing  that  honest 
word.  Certainly  detachment  does  not  account 
for  it,  or  a  critical  temper,  or  much  reading, 
173 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

or  a  contemplative  habit.  To  write  spiritlessly 
of  spiritual  things,  to  cheapen  "  what  is  most 
dear,"  to  read  merely  to  give  advice,  to  make 
rules  for  genius  and  frame  little  definitions  of 
greatness,  to  turn  your  back  upon  the  crowd 
only  that  the  crowd  may  see  your  back,  to  refer 
to  vague  standards  and  exhibit  vague  con 
tempts — this  is  not  the  "  academic  "  life.  It  is 
high  life  in  Philistia,  where  the  breath  of  one's 
nostrils  is  le  snobbisme  littcraire. 


174 


THE    ART    OF    DISPARAGEMENT 


VIII 

THE     ART     OF     DISPARAGEMENT 

I  HAVE  lately  read  an  inordinate  amount  of 
hostile  criticism,  especially  as  employed  in 
literary  controversy,  drawn  less  by  any  expec 
tation  of  learning  the  truth  than  by  the  hope  of 
being  warmed  by  the  violent  language.  The 
point  of  view  is  the  main  point  in  hostile  criti 
cism,  and  yet  it  is  the  last  point  that  the  critic 
ever  makes  clear  to  the  person  whom  he  criti 
cises.  All  my  life  long  I  have  been  sitting  in 
judgment  on  other  people  and  they  on  me. 
Had  there  been  any  means  of  executing  the 
sentence,  I  should  have  hanged  many  of  them, 
and  I  myself  should  have  many  times  been 
hanged;  but  the  arm  of  the  law  does  not  reach 
our  pet  aversions,  and  if  it  did,  they  would  go 
177 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

to  the  gallows  quite  ignorant  of  the  real  nature 
of  their  offence.  For  criticism  is  very  largely 
the  art  of  assigning  the  wrong  reason — a 
trumping  up  of  sententious  excuses,  a 
straining  after  the  point  of  view  of  society, 
or  posterity,  or  the  angels,  or  other  critics,  or 
the  "  cultivated  few."  Criticism  stripped  of 
its  public  robes  of  office  is  generally  a  private 
whim.  That  is  what  makes  controversy  often 
seem  so  strange  to  the  non-combatants,  espe 
cially  literary  controversy,  turning  as  it  does 
on  private  tastes  which  masquerade  as  public 
duties. 

Here,  for  example,  is  our  old  friend,  Profes 
sor  Woodside,  author  of  numerous  volumes 
in  praise  of  rusticity  and  the  quiet  life,  and 
perhaps  of  a  dozen  others  by  the  time  this  com 
mentary  appears,  one  of  the  most  harmless  of 
present  writers.  He  paused  for  a  moment 
some  time  ago  and  addressed  a  reply  to  his 
178 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

critics.  They  had  taken,  it  seems,  a  moral  tone 
with  him,  complaining  that  his  insistence  on 
the  quiet  virtues  and  contemplative  life  tended 
to  unmanly  acquiescence.  Retorting  in  the 
same  moral  strain,  he  said  there  was  no  ten 
dency  in  his  writings  to  underrate  the  energies 
of  active  life  but  only  to  deny  that  the  selfish 
desire  of  personal  success  was  the  proper  mo 
tive  for  them..  So  it  came  to  the  usual  impasse 
between  a  man  and  his  critics.  I  hasten  to  as 
sure  any  one  whose  hesitating  eye  may  have 
travelled  to  this  point  that  I  am  not  going  to 
discuss  the  moral  tendency  of  Professor  Wood- 
side's  books.  I  mention  the  matter  merely  as 
an  instance  of  the  hypocrisy  of  critics  gener 
ally. 

We    belong    to    a    race    that    dearly    loves 
to   moralise   an    essentially   unmoral   situation. 
We  hide  personal  dislike  behind  moral  disap 
proval  if  we  can,  and  if  there  is  any  way  of  con- 
179 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

verting  a  private  distaste  into  terms  of  public 
disaster,  we  find  it.  It  is,  I  presume,  bred  in 
the  bone,  and  I  dare  say,  as  a  critic,  I  too 
should,  if  anybody  poked  me  through  the  bars 
or  set  before  me  the  food  I  did  not  like,  utter 
the  same  irrelevant  moral  outcries,  but  that 
does  not  make  the  thing  seem,  in  an  honest  in 
terval,  any  less  preposterous.  It  is  too  obvious 
that  we  damn  people  the  deepest  for  the  things 
tkey  cannot  help  and  love  them  for  the  random 
gifts  of  nature.  We  freely  forgive  all  the  ras 
cals  in  literature  from  Benvenuto  Cellini  down 
— Sterne  for  his  snivelling,  Boswell  for  his 
truckling,  Samuel  Pepys  for  his  mean  little 
heart.  We  spend  our  days  in  invidiously  rat 
ing  one  man  above  another  and  one  woman 
above  all  others,  edging  away  from  estimable 
gentlemen  at  our  clubs,  dining  with  traitors. 
The  rule  applies  as  often  in  literature  as  in 
daily  life  that  we  could  better  spare  a  better 
180 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

man.  We  all  know  it  and  we  all  act  upon  it, 
but  I  doubt  if  there  has  ever  been  an  Anglo- 
Saxon  critic  who  has  not  at  some  time  lied 
about  it. 

The  hypocrisy,  of  course,  is  in  inverse  ratio 
to  the  power  of  self-analysis.  There  are 
times  when  I  half  believe  I  hate  Smith  on 
principle,  for  there  is  nothing  about  Smith  to 
lure  me  away  from  the  most  minute  solicitude 
for  the  general  good.  In  Smith's  presence, 
the  mind,  having,  as  you  may  say,  no  personal 
interests,  becomes  intensely  public-spirited 
and  feels  like  a  picket  of  the  public  conscience 
as  against  Smith,  ready  to  shoot  for  hearth 
and  country  the  moment  a  moral  twig  snaps. 
If  the  devil  talked  like  Smith,  what  a  pleasure 
to  be  a  Christian  soldier !  In  a  sanguine  mood 
I  can  almost  prove  that  the  devil  does  talk 
like  Smith.  Then  along  comes  Jones,  thrice 
as  pernicious,  but  more  beguiling,  and  not 
181 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

one  blow  do  I  strike  for  an  endangered  uni 
verse,  although  Jones,  reduced  to  a  moral  syl 
labus,  Jones,  issued  in  pamphlet  form  per 
haps  by  one  of  Professor  Woodside's  critics, 
would  surely  be  an  improper  text-book  for 
the  human  race.  But  I  would  not  have  him 
thus  reduced.  It  is  only  when  a  living  man 
is  no  more  to  us  than  a  teaspoon  that  we 
think  exclusively  of  his  moral  medicine  to  an 
ailing  world;  and  so  it  is  with  a  living  book. 
Having  no  interest  in  Shakespeare  as  a  poet, 
Tolstoi  and  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  very  naturally 
hold  him  to  strict  account  as  a  philanthro 
pist,  missionary,  Fabian  lecturer,  early  Chris 
tian.  When  we  are  not  amused,  we  remember 
our  moral  lessons  to  humanity,  and  we  can  al 
ways  find  some  large  ennobling  reason  for  not 
being  amused.  If  we  do  not  love  Shakespeare 
let  us  say  it  is  because  Shakespeare  did  not 
love  the  poor.  And  when  it  comes  to  the 
182 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

"  objective "  critics,  as  they  call  themselves, 
dissectors,  classifiers,  teachers  of  taste, 
strange  beings  fatally  absorbed  in  such  prob 
lems  as  how  to  find  the  greatest  common  fac 
tor  of  Mark  Twain  and  the  Book  of  Job, 
there  is,  I  believe,  little  liking  for  any  man's 
company.  That  is  why  they  so  often  cut  out 
the  "  central  thought "  of  an  author  and 
throw  the  rest  of  him  away. 

But  to  return  to  the  subject  of  verbal  con 
flicts,  of  which  I  have  often  been  an  inter 
ested  observer.  I  once  attended  an  important 
encounter  between  Pragmatists  and  Anti- 
pragmatists.  A  great  many  other  ill-quali 
fied  persons  have  had  their  say  about  Pragma 
tism,  so  why  not  I?  To  be  sure,  I  cannot 
settle  offhand  the  question,  What  is  Truth? 
i — at  least  not  so  completely  but  that  a  doubt 
may  linger  in  some  minds  after  I  have  spoken. 
But  though  I  shall  not  insist  on  my  authority 
183 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

as  a  metaphysician,  I  do  set  up  as  a  connois 
seur  of  word-battles,  with  rather  a  pretty 
taste,  never  having  missed,  so  far  as  I  recall, 
any  chance  to  overhear  a  literary  altercation. 
Speaking,  therefore,  as  an  amateur  of  these 
savage  spectacles,  as  a  student  of  bitterness 
and  rancour,  of  the  lie  given  and  returned,  of 
the  evasion,  the  cross-purpose,  the  word-trap, 
the  moral  bomb-shell,  and  the  harsh  laugh  of 
logical  supremacy,  I  do  not  hesitate  to  class 
the  pragmatist  polemics,  in  all  that  pertains 
to  the  noble  art  of  wrangling,  among  the  very 
best  of  recent  misunderstandings.  It  is  not 
too  technical.  Of  course,  if  the  anti-prag- 
matist  really  set  out  to  find  what  the  prag 
matist  was  about,  it  might  be  difficult  for  us 
to  follow,  but  philosophers  fight  like  other 
men,  and  combat  is  not  interpretation.  They 
had  rather  thump  a  pragmatist  than  explain 
him,  and  quite  right,  too,  and  most  fortunate 
184 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

for  us  outsiders,  for  a  thump  is  clearer  than 
an  explanation.  That  is  why  we  simple  folk 
may,  without  impropriety,  attend  these  prag- 
matistic  encounters,  for  controversies  are 
never  philosophic  even  when  philosophy  is  the 
theme;  and  when  once  the  philosopher  loses 
his  head  there  remains  nothing  about  him  that 
need  abash  a  common  person. 

The  anti-pragmatists  won  two  remarkable 
verbal  triumphs.  The  first  occurred  in  the 
following  passage  in  a  somewhat  elaborate 
and  altogether  serious  attack  on  Pragmatism: 

"  And  now,  to  make  matters  perfectly  clear,  let  us 
apply  to  this  radical  pragmatic  meaning  of  truth  the 
same  illustration  which  was  used  in  the  preceding  lec 
ture  to  bring  out  the  exact  meaning  of  the  correspon 
dence  theory.  Poor  Peter,  you  will  remember,  has  a 
toothache,  and  John,  who  is  thinking  about  his  friend, 
has  an  idea  that  Peter  has  a  toothache.  As  for  the 
pragmatist  the  truth  of  an  idea  means  its  *  efficient 
working,*  its  *  satis factoriness,'  *  the  process  of  veri- 

185 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

fication,'  the  truth  of  John's  idea  will  'consist  in* 
its  satis factoriness  to  John,  in  its  efficient  working,  in 
its  verifying  itself.  If  it  works,  if  it  harmonises  with 
John's  later  experiences  of  Peter's  actions,  if  it  leads 
in  a  direction  that  is  worth  while,  it  is  true  (a  state 
ment  to  which,  indeed,  all  might  assent),  and  its  truth 
consists  in  this  working,  this  harmony,  this  verification 
process.  John's  thought,  the  pragmatist  insists,  be 
comes  true  only  when  it  has  worked  out  successfully, 
only  when  his  later  experience  confirms  it  by  being  con 
sistent  with  it — for  remember  truth  is  not  verifiability, 
but  the  process  of  verification.  *  Truth  happens  to  an 
idea.  It  becomes  true,  is  made  true  by  events.'  At  the 
time  when  John  had  the  thought  about  Peter  the 
thought  was  neither  true  nor  false,  for  the  process  of 
verification  had  not  yet  begun,  nothing  had  as  yet  hap 
pened  to  the  idea.  It  becomes  true,  is  made  true  by 
events,  as  John  thought,  but,  all  the  same,  John's 
thought  was  not  true.  It  did  not  become  true  until 
several  hours  afterward — in  fact,  we  may  suppose,  not 
until  Peter,  having  cured  his  toothache,  told  John  about 
it.  The  thought,  *  Peter  has  a  toothache,'  thus  as  it 
happens,  turns  out  not  to  have  been  true  while  Peter 
actually  had  the  toothache,  and  to  have  become  true 
only  after  he  had  ceased  to  have  a  toothache." 

186 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

In  like  manner,  another  writer  made  short 
work  of  a  certain  essay  on  the  Ambiguity  of 
Truth— 

The  reader  who  will,  throughout  this  essay  on  the 
ambiguity  of  truth,  substitute  "butter"  for  "truth" 
and  "  margarine "  for  "  falsehood,"  will  find  that  the 
point  involved  is  one  which  has  no  special  relevance  to 
the  nature  of  truth.  There  is  "butter  as  claim,"  i.  e., 
whatever  the  grocer  calls  butter;  this,  we  will  suppose, 
includes  margarine.  There  is  "  butter  validated," 
which  is  butter  that,  after  the  usual  tests,  has  been 
found  not  to  be  margarine.  But  there  is  no  ambigu 
ity  in  the  word  "  butter."  Wlien  the  grocer,  pointing 
to  the  margarine,  says,  "  This  is  butter,"  he  means  by 
"butter"  precisely  what  the  customer  means  when  he 
says,  "  This  is  not  butter."  To  argue  from  the  gro 
cer's  language  that  "butter"  has  two  meanings,  one  of 
which  includes  margarine,  while  the  other  does  not, 
would  be  obviously  absurd.  Similarly  when  the  rash 
man,  without  applying  any  tests,  affirms  "  this  belief 
is  true,"  while  the  prudent  man,  after  applying  suit 
able  tests,  judges  "this  belief  is  not  true,"  the  two  men 
mean  the  same  thing  by  the  word  "  true,"  only  one  of 
them  applies  it  wrongly. 

187 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

The  spirit  of  these  remarks  is  plain  to  the 
least  technical  of  observers.  It  is  not  philos 
ophy  ;  it  is  war.  No  man  in  philosophic  mood 
would  ever  have  contrived  that  toothache  pit 
fall;  he  would  have  doubted  rather  his  -own 
understanding.  He  would  have  consulted 
with  pragmatists  in  advance — it  was  clearly  a 
matter  for  consultation — and  told  them  what 
a  turn  they  had  given  him,  how  they  seemed 
to  say  that  if  Peter  had  a  toothache  and  John 
said  so,  John  lied,  but,  of  course,  they  could 
not  mean  it,  and  would  they  kindly 
explain  what  they  did  mean?  And  so  of  the 
other  man — he  would  have  gone  straight  to 
the  enemy  with  his  butter  question,  more  in 
curiosity  than  in  hatred,  and  asked  for  a 
plain  statement  of  the  pragmatist  view  of  the 
butter-margarine  relation,  which  is,  I  believe. 
Butter  is  as  butter  does.  By  going  to  him 
with  his  dilemma  he  could  easily  have  had 
188 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

both  horns  of  it  removed,  but  he  did  not  wish 
to  do  so.  He  wished  to  retain  them  for  pur 
poses  of  impalement.  There  you  have  the 
spirit  of  the  conflict.  When  the  battle  mood  * 
is  on  him,  one  does  not  wish  to  understand  the 
foeman.  Time  spent  in  understanding  is 
time  lost  in  battle,  and  no  good  word-fighter 
will  ever  seek  an  enemy's  meaning  when  there 
are  verbal  shifts  by  which  that  enemy  may  be 
proved  insane. 

But  in  purely  literary  or  journalistic  fields 
of  contest  there  is,  I  fear,  not  only  a  falling 
off  in  the  quality  of  the  indignation,  but  a 
growing  reluctance  on  the  part  of  journalists 
and  men  of  letters  to  say  the  first  hot,  natural, 
senseless  thing  that  occurs  to  them,  thus  di 
minishing  what  was  once  a  source  of  lively 
public  entertainment.  Prizing  as  I  believe 
most  readers  do  any  form  of  literary  anima 
tion  even  when  arising  from  bad  blood,  I  al- 
189 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ways  hasten  to  these  scenes  of  verbal  conflict 
in  the  hope  of  seeing  manly  blows  exchanged. 
The  eyes  of  the  cat  are  greener  and  her  tail  is 
handsomer  when  she  fights.  It  is  not  unrea 
sonable  to  expect  as  much  of  authors.  Self- 
love  has  ever  been  a  rich  literary  vein.  Ad 
mirable  consequences  have  flowed  from  its 
wounds  and  many  a  good  poem  has  followed 
a  puncture.  Great  happiness  has  often  been 
shed  upon  the  world  by  the  simple  process  of 
pricking  an  author.  But  in  no  recent  literary 
encounter  have  I  found  anything  at  all  com 
mensurate  with  the  hostile  intentions — not  a 
"  Parthian  dart,"  or  an  "  envenomed  shaft," 
or  a  "  flick  on  the  raw "  or  a  "  well-directed 
thrust,"  or  any  of  the  mordancies,  causticities, 
pilloryings,  unmaskings,  witherings,  and  ex 
coriations  which  connoisseurs  in  literary  bit 
terness  delight  to  describe.  It  has  been  a  sad 
display]  of  verbal  impotence,  humiliating  to 
190 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

two  warlike  Anglo-Saxon  nations.  Often  the 
rage  is  barely  articulate,  passing  off  in  mere 
brief  cries  of  "fool,"  "clown,"  "driveller," 
and  "mountebank,"  as  if  the  hater  had  run 
short  of  breath.  Somebody  calls  the  enemy  a 
"  charlatan."  Another  says  "  self-advertiser  " 
and  lets  it  go  at  that, — a  term,  by  the  way, 
that  applies  as  truly  to  the  prophet  as  to  the 
fool. 

"Why  do  you  box  my  ears  in  public?" 
said  a  well-known  writer  of  the  present  day  to 
his  foeman,  who  had  accused  him  of  using  too 
many  words.  Rather  a  sickly  attenuation  of 
the  good,  old-fashioned  "reply  to  my  critics." 
You  have  a  "  pygmy  soul,"  wrote  another 
warrior,  and  if  Emerson  were  now  living  and 
should  see  you,  Emerson  would  be  "  very  much 
surprised."  A  playwright  disliking  a  review 
of  his  play  in  a  magazine,  wrote  to  the  editor, 
saying  that  the  critic  who  wrote  it  was  evi- 
191 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

dently  quite  "drunk,"  to  which  the  editor 
replied  that  this  was  an  "outrageous  sugges 
tion,'*  for,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  he  had  writ 
ten  the  article  himself;  and  he  went  on  to 
"confess"  further  "surprise"  that  "a  man 
of  your  intellectual  attainments  should," 
etc.,  etc.  Surprise,  indeed,  is  a  frequent 
weapon  in  these  gingerly  contests.  Attack 
the  average  writer  and  he  either  retorts  with 
an  expression  of  "  surprise "  or  remarks  su 
perbly  that  considering  the  character  of  his 
assailant  he  is  "not  at  all  surprised."  His 
adversary  then  expresses  amazement  at  this 
surprise.  Why  is  surprise  or  the  absence  of 
it  so  highly  esteemed  for  polemical  purposes? 
Time  and  again  I  have  been  drawn  by  the 
promise  of  a  good  bout  between  literary  ego 
tisms,  heard  the  hiss  of  the  flying  insult  and 
the  cry  of  the  wounded  vanity,  seen  the  lie 
passing  bacK  and  forth,  and  self-love  stripped 
192 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

for  action,  only  to  find  the  whole  thing  going 
off  in  a  mere  popping  of  astonishments. 
"You're  a  Bayswater  pessimist,"  was  the  an 
gry  editor's  parting  shot  on  this  occasion. 
"  You're  a  blazing  boy,"  said  the  playwright 
fiercely.  And  each  withdrew  claiming  the  vic 
tory. 

These  are  fair  specimens  of  modern  literary 
warfare.  No  spirit  in  either  attack  or  de 
fence;  a  nose-to-thumb  gesture,  a  flounce,  a 
swish  of  skirts,  the  banging  of  a  distant  door, 
both  crow  languidly,  and  so  the  battle  ends 
without  pleasure  to  the  looker-on,  pain  to  the 
victim,  or  relief  to  the  assailant's  feelings. 

Shades  of  a  thousand  literary  battlefields, 
how  pitifully  we  have  dwindled !  There  is  not 
a  good  round  curse  amongst  us,  not  a  danger 
ous  noun  or  prickly  adjective.  Tease  an 
editor  and  out  comes  his  pocket-handkerchief. 
He  regrets  and  deplores  the  conduct  of  his  ad- 
193 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

versary.  He  is  very  much  surprised.  It  is, 
of  course,  most  disappointing  to  the  reader, 
who  ought  always  to  be  tertium  gaudens  at 
these  affairs. 

Not  that  I  would  bring  back  the  days  of 
The  Dunciad  or  of  English  Bards  and  Scotch 
Reviewers.  You  cannot  ask  an  angry  modern 
author  to  plan  these  long  campaigns,  or  to 
rout  the  household  out  at  midnight  as  Pope 
did  in  his  transports  of  inspired  malignity. 
But  as  a  lover  of  the  manly  art  (for  others)  I 
do  object  to  this  cheating  of  our  gladiatorial 
expectations  by  exhibitions  in  spilt  milk.  For 
a  literary  fight  is,  after  all,  a  public  occasion. 
It  is  a  promise  of  warmth  and  of  heightened 
colour  and  we  are  justified  in  demanding  some 
little  excitement  as  we  hasten  to  the  field.  It 
is  unseemly  that  literary  wrath,  to  which  we 
are  invited,  should  bring  forth  no  fruit  meet 
for  publication. 

Moreover,  every  honest  writer  is  entitled  to 
194 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

at  least  one  dangerous  foe,  none  of  your 
splutterers  of  "  fool,"  "  mountebank,"  and 
"  mud  prophets,"  but  of  the  sort  who  will  take 
pains  in  order  to  inflict  them — whose  rule  for 
the  arena  shall  loe  Ita  feri  ut  se  sentiat  mori, 
or  if  that  high  standard  cannot  be  attained, 
who  will  at  le&st  so  strike  that  he  will  amuse 
the  amphitheatre.  And  surely  if  a  writer 
cannot  fight  well  on  so  good  an  argument  as 
his  own  self-love  (often  the  most  literary  part 
of  him),  there  will  soon  be  an  end  to  all  sport 
for  us  spectators. 

Nowadays  when  a  critic  is  angry,  he  merely 
seems  out  of  sorts,  the  wits  being  lost  along 
with  the  temper.  So  the  sting  is  drawn  from 
the  opposition,  which  is  as  bad  for  books  as  it 
is  for  politics.  It  does  not  mean  an  era  of 
good  feeling.  It  means  an  era  of  no  feeling 
at  all. 

But  here  I  seem  to  have  fallen  into  the  com 
mon  error  of  rating  the  value  of  ridicule  ac- 
195 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

cording  to  the  pains  of  the  intended  victim. 
There  is  of  course  a  risk  in  those  customary 
comparisons  between  satire  and  teeth,  stilet 
tos,  clubs,  vitriol,  bullets,  scorpions,  scalpels, 
gunpowder  and  harpoons.  Though  in  good 
usage  and  of  great  antiquity,  they  are  apt  to 
raise  our  hopes  too  high.  The  scalds  and 
perforations  can  seldom  be  authenticated,  and 
even  when  they  can,  it  does  not  follow  that  the 
ridicule  is  good.  To  read  certain  newspaper 
satires  over  again  would  be  as  deadly  as  any 
thing  they  did  to  the  victim.  No  man  would 
do  it,  even  were  it  proved  that  a  maddened 
Chief  Magistrate  had  fled  to  the  jungle  on  ac 
count  of  them.  I  suppose  I  should  not  really 
value  certain  lines  indited  to  a  "woman  with 
a  serpent's  tongue,"  even  had  the  lady  died  of 
them.  It  is  a  mistake  to  measure  literary 
merit  by  the  damage  it  did  at  the  time. 
Literary  people,  accustomed  as  they  are  to 
196 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

open  their  eyes  very  wide  at  one  another  and 
exalt  the  deeds  of  daring  of  the  pen,  have  no 
idea  what  moderate  creatures  we  readers 
really  are.  The  most  we  can  say  of  "  enven 
omed  shafts,"  as  we  know  them  nowadays,  is 
that  they  sometimes  almost  tickle.  The  "mer 
ciless  wit"  of  a  leading  article  may  at  times 
compete  with  a  breakfast  muffin.  Few  sensa 
tions  are  less  noticeable  than  these  literary 
emotions  that  we  ought  to  feel. 

Even  when  speaking  of  good  satire,  writers 
often  betray  much  confusion  of  mind.  One  of 
them  has  praised  Pope's  satire  on  Addison 
because  it  was  so  true  that  Addison  must  have 
felt  ashamed.  At  this  late  day  what  do  we 
care  for  Addison's  guilty  blushes?  As  lies 
about  Addison  they  would  serve  our  turn  as 
well,  for  if  Addison  did  not  give  his  little  Sen 
ate  laws  and  sit  attentive  to  his  own  applause, 
we  know  the  man  to  do  it — we  might  do  it  our- 
197 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

seives  at  a  pinch.  Permanent  satire  is  not 
valued  for  the  author's  application  but  for 
private  applications  of  our  own.  The  best  of 
satirists  have  never  bagged  their  game.  Nor 
is  it  necessary  that  a  single  reader  shall  be 
blasted;  it  is  enough  for  him  to  hope  that 
some  one  else  is.  All  of  which  is  obvious;  yet 
we  still  go  on  reckoning  the  powers  of  ridicule 
in  terms  of  estimated  fool-destruction. 

Now  and  then  some  one  bitterly  reminds  us 
that  what  this  country  needs  is  a  genuine  satir 
ist,  which  of  course  is  true,  but  he  goes  on  to  de 
pict  a  scene  of  quite  incredible  excitement — i 
every  fool  up  a  tree,  solemn  folk  exploding, 
self-complacency  punctured,  vice  pilloried, 
humbug  stripped,  and  a  small  number  of  very 
intelligent  persons  (himself  among  them)  be 
side  themselves  for  joy  at  the  well-directed 
cuts,  bites,  burns,  stings,  and  rapier-thrusts. 
Yet  he  knows  as  well  as  we  do  that  we  should 
198 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

all  come  off  without  a  scratch.  When  a  great 
satire  bursts  upon  the  world  the  surprising 
thing  has  always  been  its  utter  harmlessness. 
The  vices  do  not  "slink  to  cover,"  the  fool 
does  not  know  he  is  being  killed,  the  wounds  of 
vanity  all  heal  by  first  intention,  and  the  de 
flated  pomposities  of  our  middle  age  fill  again 
as  naturally  as  the  lungs  do.  And,  after  all, 
true  satire  is  not  the  sneering  substance  that 
we  know,  but  satire  that  includes  the  satirist. 
That  is  the  grave  omission  of  the  usual  satir 
ist,  the  omission  of  himself — nearly  all  the 
world  to  the  literary  person  yet  left  out  of 
the  world  in  almost  every  extremely  sarcastic 
survey  of  it.  There  can  of  course  be  no  sound 
derision  of  things  sub  specie  eternitatis  that 
does  not  include  the  blushing  author.  True 
satire  is  always  self-ironical,  and  would  have 
the  whole  world  by  the  ears.  While  waiting 
for  that  very  improbable  man  of  genius  to  blow 
LL99 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

up  to  the  sky  our  follies  and  his  own,  we  might 
be  doing  useful  work  at  the  reduction  of  lit 
erary  terms  to  a  size  more  appropriate  to  the 
little  thoughts  behind  them.  But  true  satire 
was  not  the  aim  of  the  verbal  hostilities  which  I 
have  attended  so  eagerly  these  many  years. 
They  sprang  from  grudges  personal  and  bit 
ter.  Their  blows  were  aimed  at  single  heads. 
The  tumult  and  the  shouting  promised  well. 
And  though  it  was  unreasonable  to  hope  that 
either  warrior  would  be  wounded  fatally,  they 
might  at  least  have  been  more  accurately  in 
sulting  and  more  expressively  enraged. 


200 


INTERNATIONAL    IMPRESSIONISM 


IX 

INTERNATIONAL     IMPRESSIONISM 

WE  no  longer  anthropomorphise  the  deity 
— at  least  not  openly.  The  man  who  called 
his  sermon  "  a  bird's-eye  view  of  God "  is 
clearly  an  exception.  Nor  do  we  invoke  in 
neat  pentameters  the  personified  emotions, 
tastes,  branches  of  learning,  scientific  discov 
eries,  trades  and  muses.  No  more  of  "  All 
hail,  oh  Agriculture "  or  "  Inoculation,  heav 
enly  maid,  appear."  But  we  make  up  for  it 
with  our  philosophic  wolves  and  thoughtful 
rabbits  and  melodramatic  hens — no  mere  fig 
ures  of  rhetoric  and  beast  fable,  either,  but 
certified  of  eye-witnesses,  with  affidavits,  mind 
you,  that  cock-robin  was  killed  by  the  sparrow 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

with  his  little  arrow.  And  especially  there  is 
the  huge  imagery  of  nations,  so  glib  and  defi 
nite,  Germany  in  a  word,  Italy  in  a  nut-shell, 
immoral  France,  stolid  Britain,  types,  ten 
dencies  and  signs  of  the  times,  all  dancing 
around  on  the  care-free  pages  of  men  whose  sole 
aim  is  to  make  the  best  possible  story  out  of 
the  least  possible  experience,  but  who  are  ranged 
alongside  De  Tocqueville  and  other  serious  ob 
servers,  as  if  that  sort  of  thing  were  their  aim. 
We  still  forget  that  they  come  not  to  see  but 
to  invent  us. 

We  forget  that  for  literary  purposes  this  is 
not  a  country  on  the  map.  America  is  a  happy 
guessing-ground,  bounded  on  all  sides  by  the 
Personal  Equation  and  including  many  paral 
lels  of  literary  latitude.  Its  climate  Varies 
with  the  health  of  the  visitor  and  its  people 
have  only  such  characteristics  as  a  rapid  writer 
can  most  effectively  describe.  It  is,  on  the 
204 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

whole,  entertainingly  inhabited,  with  readable 
race  traits,  and  concise,  often  epigrammatic, 
national  ideals.  Differences  among  the  people 
are,  as  a  rule,  uninteresting  and  non-essential. 
The  things  that  occur  first  to  the  literary  visi 
tor  are  at  once  the  most  significant  and  the 
best  to  say.  The  main  products  are  unverifi- 
able  conclusions,  which  meet  the  traveller  on 
every  side;  and,  indeed,  in  sheer  point  of  size 
are  more  impressive  than  the  skyscrapers.  The 
institutions,  though  varying  with  the  mind's 
eye,  are  alike  in  yielding  an  immediate  moral 
lesson.  Everywhere  you  see  the  national  pas 
time — matching  with  destiny  for  beers;  every 
where  the  national  tendency — declining  like  the 
Roman  Empire,  though  perhaps  that  fate  may 
be  averted  by  the  moral  soundness  which  is  at 
the  bottom  of  the  American  character,  as 
shown  by  two  typical  gentlemen  in  the  smok 
ing-room  and  three  significant  magazines. 
205 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Growth  is  wonderful,  including  the  growth  of 
the  writer's  convictions.  The  distances  seem 
incredible.  It  is  six  hours  from  New  York  to 
Washington,  and  Chicago  is  even  further  from 
the  truth ;  and  there  is  room  in  the  single  State 
of  Pennsylvania  for  several  European  generali 
ties. 

I  have  been  moved  to  these  remarks  by  read 
ing  the  accumulated  press  clippings  in  regard 
to  a  most  entertaining  volume,  which  obviously 
belongs  to  this  journalism  of  inverted  pyra 
mids,  but  was  taken  by  Americans  quite  gener 
ally  as  an  attempt  to  describe  an  actual  coun-> 
try.  They  found  the  account  "  favourable." 
Had  it  been  unfavourable  they  would  no  doubt 
have  hurled  back  the  insult  in  the  author's 
teeth.  The  country  is  still  gallantly  de 
fended  in  the  newspapers  against  any  scur 
rying  foreigner's  literary  note-book.  Ap 
parently  things  have  not  changed  much 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

since  a  boy  of  twenty-three  brought  down 
upon  his  American  notes  the  vengeance  of 
our  staunch  old  home  guard  in  the  press 
or  since  these  same  sleepless  tutelary  gentle 
men  repelled  a  redoubtable  humorist  or 
argued  gravely  with  the  hereditary  proclivities 
of  a  French  novelist  and  a  German  university 
professor.  Meanwhile  most  of  us  continue  to 
read  these  books  for  the  pleasure  they  afford, 
knowing  that  such  truth  as  they  contain  is  there 
by  accident.  Who  cares,  for  example,  whether 
the  man  is  right  or  wrong?  That  is  not  the 
kind  of  question  to  ask  that  kind  of  man.  We 
like  these  people  for  their  impulsive  ways  and 
general  air  of  wildness.  We  want  the  fine  swing 
of  certainty  and  plenty  of  prejudice  and  some 
brisk  invective  and  sarcasm  and  the  first 
thoughts  after  the  first  cocktail  and  the  damna 
tion  of  Chicago  and  a  guess  at  the  Middle 
West  and  lots  of  large  advice  about  abolishing 
207 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Congress  and  suppressing  the  rich  and  inter 
marrying  with  coloured  people  (as  a  solution  of 
the  negro  problem) ,  and  all  that.  We  want  the 
writer's  own  particular  America,  the  prolonga 
tion  of  his  own  blessed  British,  Gallic,  Teu 
tonic,  Slavic,  bilious  or  sanguine,  literary  tem 
perament,  a  land  of  personal  patches  with  vast 
areas  of  omission,  peopled  mainly  by  himself 
and  quivering  with  his  emotions.  To  the  well- 
trained  literary  mind,  phrase-haunted,  fiction- 
rooted,  burning  for  the  picturesque  and  sali 
ent,  what  is  a  country  but  a  good  excuse?  Any 
new  land  is  a  fairyland,  and  things  are  as  they 
look  best  in  print.  To  bother  him  or  our  own 
heads  with  vain  questions  of  verisimilitude  is, 
to  say  the  least,  unsportsmanlike. 

In  this  instance,  the  gigantesque  journalist 

admitted  frankly  that  he  had  been  in  America 

just  six  weeks,  yet  from  one  end  of  the  country 

to  the  other,  to  judge  from  these  newspaper 

208 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

comments,  readers  were  asking  if  he  was  fair 
and  accurate  and  properly  equipped  for  his 
task.  Many  of  them  praised  his  "  philosophic 
insight,"  though  how  they  knew  he  had  it  is 
by  no  means  clear.  Some  condemned  him  as 
"  superficial,"  as  if  any  human  being  in  the 
circumstances  could  be  otherwise;  and  some 
complained  that  he  was  "  inconclusive  " — fancy 
having  to  be  conclusive  about  America  in  six 
weeks.  It  must  have  embarrassed  the  modest 
author,  who  had  not  in  the  least  the  air  of  a 
Daniel  come  to  the  nation's  judgment  but  of  a 
writer  in  search  of  literary  incentives.  As 
well  apply  astronomical  tests  to  verses  to  the 
moon.  We  are  still  given  over  to  great  literal- 
ness  in  these  matters  and  cannot  permit  any 
harmless  light  literary  character  to  record  his 
ferry-boat  emotions  without  harassing  our 
selves  about  the  truth. 

Of    course,    he    and    all    the    other    recent 
209 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

nation-tasters  may,  for  aught  I  know,  be 
profoundly  and  enormously  right.  The  man 
who  stoutly  tells  me  what  the  matter  is  with 
Asia  to-day,  how  Europe  is  feeling,  and  whether 
America  ever  can  be  cured  always  has  me  under 
his  thumb.  Not  being  stationed  on  a  sign  of 
the  Zodiac  I  am  in  no  position  to  reply.  And 
why  should  one  wish  to  deny  by  logic,  com 
parative  statistics,  ethnology,  political  science, 
or  indeed  drag  the  intellect  into  the  thing  at 
all?  Is  it  not  pleasant  to  sit  humbly  by  and 
see  the  populations  of  the  earth  "  sized  up," 
and  hear  Europe  talking  to  America  as  man 
to  man  and  learn  the  crisp  truth  about  the 
Tropic  of  Capricorn,  or  the  century,  or  modern 
society,  or  man?  Need  we  be  forever  asking 
how  he  got  his  certitudes,  and  if  it  was  the 
real  America  that  met  him  in  his  boarding- 
house  and  if  he  surely  grasped  the  negro  prob 
lem  while  talking  to  those  two  coloured  men? 
210 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Literary  travel  is  not  in  search  of  fact  but  of 
fluency,  and  the  route  always  lies  away  from 
the  land  of  many  things  to  the  land  where  one 
swallow  makes  a  summer. 

Travel  refreshes  the  faith  in  types.  It 
is  the  rule  of  present-day  belles-lettres  that 
every  country  shall  be  peopled  with  types. 
At  home  men  will  not  stay  long  in  types, 
splitting  up  on  acquaintance  into  mere  per 
sonal  and  miscellaneous  Browns  and  Robin 
sons,  of  small  use  for  the  larger  literary  pur 
poses  and  refusing  absolutely  to  typify  man 
kind.  As  to  Woman  in  General,  that  great 
literary  science  is  often  rudely  shattered  by 
sheer  knowledge  of  one's  wife.  So  off  for  a 
new  land  where  everybody  is  an  allegory.  It 
may  be  safe  for  philosophers  to  stay  and  scru 
tinise,  but  for  these  brave,  vivacious  interna 
tional  certainties  the  land  must  be  skimmed 
and  the  people  merely  squinted  at;  or  they, 
211 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

too,  will  resolve  into  Browns  and  Robinsons 
to  the  spoiling  of  good  phrases  and  the  blur 
ring  of  bird's-eye  views.  The  typical  American 
is  seen  at  once  or  never.  There  is  no  hope  for 
anJ  gigantesque  journalist  who  does  not  find 
him  on  the  pier.  It  is  to  get  rid  of  facts,  not 
find  them,  that  they  come,  and  to  escape  from 
second  thoughts,  those  sad  disturbers  of  liter 
ary  traffic.  It  is  not  to  see  a  new  kind  of  man 
but  to  see  the  same  kind  newly. 

But  here  is  matter  for  peace-promoting  so 
cieties  and  leagues  of  Anglo-American  good 
will,  for  ambassadorial  after-dinner  speeches 
and  toasts  to  distinguished  guests,  for  almost 
simultaneously  two  books  have  appeared,  one 
by  an  American  who  admires  England  and  the 
-other  by  an  Englishman  who  admires  America. 
As  an  American  I  suppose  I  ought  to  dwell 
long  and  earnestly  on  the  cheerful  import  of 
this  circumstance.  For  the  American  thinks 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

it  his  duty  to  write  on  this  subject  as  if  he  were 
fifty  years  behind  his  own  feelings  and  the  feel 
ings  of  his  fellow-countrymen.  He  assumes 
that  the  all-important  question  is  whether  the 
Englishman,  no  matter  what  sort  of  English 
man,  thinks  well  or  ill  of  the  country  as  a  whole. 
He  assumes  that  this  blushing  little  debutante 
of  a  country  is  still  intensely  anxious  about  the 
impression  that  it  has  made.  It  would  astonish 
us  if  we  were  not  so  used  to  the  strange  ar 
chaisms  of  our  daily  press.  But  just  as  many 
newspaper  writers  are  still  at  the  Manchester 
stage  of  political  economy,  so  their  patriotism 
is  of  the  tender  period  when  Dickens  published 
his  American  Notes.  Journalists  have  always 
been  our  most  old-fashioned  class,  being  too 
busy  with  the  news  of  the  day  to  lay  aside  the 
mental  habits  of  fifty  years  before.  Con 
strained  to  chase  the  aviator  in  his  aeroplane 
on  the  front  page,  they  sleep  with  Thomas 
213 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Jefferson  in  the  editorial  columns.  For  a 
glimpse  of  the  country's  intellectual  past  we 
are  accustomed  to  turn  to  the  reflective  portions 
of  the  morning  newspapers.  Reviewers  live  in 
the  old  tradition  of  patriotic  solicitude  while 
we  have  gone  on  into  utter  recklessness.  I 
never  met  a  man,  for  example,  who  seemed  to 
care  whether  these  visitors  thought  well  or  ill 
of  the  United  States.  I  never  read  a  review 
that  did  not. 

In  the  friendly  book  about  America  the 
writer  declares  that  he  found  among  "  all 
classes  of  Americans  ...  a  deep  and 
noble  desire  .  .  .  sometimes  pathetic  but 
always  dignified"  that  the  Mother  Country 
should  understand  "her  offspring  of  the 
West." 

This  is  a  very  sentimental  reading  of  the 
American's  interest  in  the  foreigner's  opinion 
— a  mere  product  of  curiosity,  self-conscious- 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ness  and  the  desire  to  "make  talk."  If  the 
writer,  who,  to  judge  from  his  book,  is  an 
uncommonly  serious  person,  found  everybody 
nobly  and  deeply  concerned  with  the  Mother 
Country's  opinion,  it  was  no  doubt  the  result 
of  conversational  embarrassment.  With  a  se 
rious  Briton  on  one's  hands,  what  else  was  there 
to  do?  Those  of  us  who  have  had  conversa 
tional  bouts  with  serious  Britons  recall  the 
desperate  straits  to  which  we  were  often  re 
duced,  the  false  interests,  the  impromptu  en 
thusiasms,  the  nervous  garrulities,  merely  to 
keep  the  ball  rolling.  One  finds  one's  self  be 
coming  almost  hysterically  sociable  with 
phlegmatic  persons.  If  one  man  says  too  lit 
tle,  the  other  says  too  much.  It  seems  a  law 
of  conversation  that  if  one  remain  a  centre  of 
gravity  the  other  shall  with  rather  foolish 
rapidity  revolve  around  him.  He  feels  re 
sponsible  for  the  other's  lack  of  animation — 
215 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

tries  to  bring  a  gleam  into  the  cold,  dead  eye. 
An  American  is  unnerved  by  the  British  pause 
following  an  introduction.  He  will  snatch  at 
any  topic  and  cling  to  it  out  of  sheer  mental 
loneliness.  He  is  not  accountable  at  these 
times,  and  the  meaning  of  what  he  says  will 
not  bear  scrutiny.  No  American  is  ever  him 
self  in  the  spurt  of  talk  following  those  tense 
moments  when,  a  serious  Briton  having  been 
cast  upon  him,  the  beating  of  his  own  heart 
was  the  only  sound  he  heard.  He  will  profess 
the  most  unnatural  ardours — asking  after  a 
stranger's  country  as  he  asks  after  a  friend's 
wife:  not  because  he  finds  the  wife  interesting, 
but  because  he  hopes  she  interests  the  friend. 
People  spoke  warmly  of  the  Mother  Country 
in  order  to  warm  this  visitor.  We  overheat 
our  conversation  as  we  do  our  rooms. 

The   American   writer   on   England,   on   the 
other  hand,  had  not  even  this  excuse  for  his 
delicacy  and  forbearance.     No  polite  disguise 
216 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

covers  the  stark  indifference  of  the  English  to 
American  opinion,  and  he  himself  remarks  how 
invulnerable  their  feelings  are. 

Yet  after  a  long  black  list  of  national  hypoc 
risies,  he  says: 

"  I  write  these  things  to  explain,  not  to  revile.  This 
is  a  great  country." 

And  referring  to  the  newspaper  practice  of 
selecting  only  the  worst  news  of  rival  countries 
— crimes,  disasters,  scandals,  he  says  he  for 
bears  to  impute  any  unworthy  motive. 

Such  assumptions  of  judicial  moderation  are 
of  course  quite  thrown  away.  In  the  familiar 
field  of  international  impressionism  we  do  not 
look  for  the  "  clear,  white  light  of  truth,"  but 
for  the  colours  of  personal  experience.  The 
chief  value  of  these  books  consists,  as  I  have 
said  before,  in  their*  re-discovery  of  human  na 
ture. 

Thus  the  American  impressionist's  book  con 
tains  an  entertaining  chapter  on  England  as 
217 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

the  "land  of  compromise,"  arraying  antithet 
ically  the  pretended  virtues  and  the  actual 
vices,  the  criticism  of  others  and  the  self-com 
placency,  and  presenting  a  most  formidable 
list  of  inconsistencies,  thus: 

A  King  who  is  not  a  King;  a  free  people 
who  are  not  actually  free ;  a  constitution  which 
does  not  exist;  a  nation  professing  Christian 
ity,  but  always  at  war,  sodden  with,  drink,  and 
bestowing  the  highest  prizes  on  the  selfish  and 
the  strong;  high  principles  sacrificed  to  expe 
diency;  personal  freedom  politically  fettered 
by  a  House  of  Lords;  contempt  for  commer 
cial  rivals  and  blindness  to  the  danger  of  their 
competition;  an  inveterate  preference  for  do 
ing  rather  than  thinking.  And  in  the  face  of 
the  various  "  new  problems  " — "  disestablish 
ment,"  "  unemployment,"  "  increased  taxes," 
"  socialism,"  foreign  rivalry  and  hatreds — no 
new  weapon  has  been  found! 
218 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

All  of  which  is  accidentally  British,  but 
essentially  of  course  it  is  only  human — mere 
marks  of  the  zoon  pvlitikon.  Under  the  same 
rhetorical  arrangement  each  land  in  turn  be 
comes  the  land  of  compromise.  They  are  home 
truths,  but  without  the  local  colour.  This  is 
saying  nothing  against  it  as  a  chapter  in  in 
ternational  impressionism.  On  the  contrary, 
comparative  reflections  would  have  impaired  the 
vivacity.  The  best  way  to  find  new  types  is  to 
forget  the  old.  After  all,  dilettantes  in  the 
psychology  of  races  do  not  compete  with  the 
hard-headed  grubbing  specialists.  Sizing  up 
a  nation  in  this  way  is  just  as  interesting  as 
ever.  The  literary  man  is  a  born  multiplier. 
It  is  easy  for  him  to  characterise  a  country; 
his  imagination  has  peopled  it.  Observe  the 
astonishing  similarity  between  the  Manchester 
bottle-maker  whom  Matthew  Arnold  found  to 
be  perfectly  typical  of  England  and  the 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Oneida  chain-maker  who  "  illuminated "  for  a 
recent  British  visitor  "much  that  had  hitherto 
been  dark  in  the  American  character."  "  His 
ignorance,"  says  Matthew  Arnold  of  this  pe 
culiarly  British  bottle  person,  "his  ignorance 
of  the  situation,  his  ignorance  of  what  makes 
nations  great,  his  ignorance  of  what  makes 
life  worth  living,  his  ignorance  of  every 
thing  except  bottles — those  infernal  bot 
tles."  "  Making  a  new  world,"  says  the  Brit 
ish  observer  of  this  utterly  American  maker 
of  chains,  "  was,  he  thought,  a  rhetorical 
flourish  about  futile  and  troublesome  activities, 
and  politicians  merely  a  disreputable  sort  of 
parasite  upon  honourable  people  who  made 
chains  and  plated  spoons."  International  im 
pressionists  traverse  the  world  to  discover  the 
people  who  live  next  door.  So  we  owe  this 
lively  chapter  about  England  as  the  land  of 
compromise,  not  to  the  writer's  perception  of 
220 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

what  is  characteristically  British,  but  to  his 
revived  interest  in  original  sin. 

This  particular  international  impressionist 
found  England  a  land  of  success-worship 
where  all's  well  that  sells  well,  and  the  weakest 
go  to  the  wall,  where  the  problem  of  serving 
both  God  and  Mammon  has  been  solved;  and 
as  his  heart  is  on  the  side  of  the  big  battalions, 
he  loves  her  all  the  better  on  that  account. 
He  accepts  all  ideas  at  their  present  commer 
cial  rating.  Success  can  do  no  wrong  and  the 
best  man  comes  to  the  top,  and  what  will  be 
come  of  England's  greatness  if  she  pampers 
her  poor?  Beware  of  discouraging  thrift. 
The  virtues  pay  and  thus  we  may  know  they 
are  virtues ;  and  away  with  socialistic  nos 
trums.  In  books  so  casually  compounded  it 
is  absurd  to  look  for  a  pattern  in  the  rags  and 
patches  of  their  thoughts.  Thought,  after 
all,  this  wise  Polonius  might  say,  is  a  branch 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

of  etiquette;  give  us  the  deeds  without  the 
thoughts ;  find  out  what  souls  are  worn  in  the 
better  sort  of  houses  and  order  one  of  the  same 
for  yourself.  It  will  keep  you  with  the  best 
Society  of  your  day  as  in  lustier  times  it  would 
have  kept  you  a  cannibal.  If  I  had  to  define 
this  appraiser  of  nations  I  should  perhaps  say 
that  in  religion  he  was  a  good  digestionist,  in 
politics  a  Darwinian  and  in  philosophy,  while  I 
am  not  learned  enough  to  place  him,  I  know  he 
belonged  somewhere  in  an  anti-pragmatist  defi 
nition  of  their  enemies.  But  having  a  light 
heart  and  a  half-closed  mind  and  a  frank  pride 
in  his  limitations  he  was  just  the  man  for  in 
ternational  impressionism,  and  gave  us  as  good 
a  bit  of  it  as  we  had  had  for  several  years.  I 
suppose  he  must  rank  rather  high  among  the 
nation-tasters. 

In  this  pleasant  but  unconscionable  pastime 
there  is  nothing  so  untidy  as  exceptions,  and 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

nothing  will  more  surely  spoil  a  sentence  than 
thinking  twice.  It  checks  the  flow  of  firm 
conviction  if  after  every  telling  paragraph 
you  write,  "  On  second  thoughts  this  is  not 
true."  Nor  is  it  by  any  means  needful. 
Readers  of  international  impressionism  ought 
by  this  time  to  have  the  converse  of  almost 
every  proposition  ringing  in  their  ears  as  they 
read. 


QUOTATION     AND     ALLUSION 


X 

QUOTATION    AND    ALLUSION 

THE  old  tradition  lingers  that  quotations  or 
bookish  allusions  will  give  the  look  of  litera 
ture  to  any  printed  page.  Sometimes  it  is 
followed  on  the  chance  that  scraps  from  the 
works  of  better  writers  may  somehow  tide  the 
reader  over  when  the  man's  own  thoughts  give 
out — a  clutch  at  the  skirts  of  literary  gentil 
ity  in  the  hope  of  redeeming  a  natural  insig 
nificance.  Sometimes  it  is  to  show  that  he  is 
a  man  of  varied  reading,  each  quotation  serv 
ing  as  an  apothecary's  diploma  that  none  may 
deny  that  he  has  graduated  from  the  book. 
At  all  events,  it  usually  has  the  air  of  deliber 
ation,  as  if  the  quotation  had  not  come  to  the 
man,  but  the  man  had  gone  to  the  quotation. 
227 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

In  the  old  days  there  were  of  course  some  in 
voluntary  quoters,  to  wit,  Burton,  in  the  An 
atomy,  who  could  not  help  bubbling  over  with 
queer,  outlandish  sayings  that  he  had  picked 
up  just  for  fun.  But  the  typical  quoter  was 
a  university  man,  who,  before  he  wrote  a  para 
graph,  went  on  a  pot-hunt  among  the  Latin 
poets  in  order  that  he  might  cite  triumphantly 
twenty-four  lines  of  Virgilian  metaphor  begin- 
ningj  "  Not  otherwise  a  Nubian  lion  with  his 
tawny  mane."  He  often  fastened  them  to  the 
context  by  invisible  threads,  merely  saying, 
"  As  the  ancient  bard  hath  so  well  remarked," 
and  pulling  out  a  block  of  Latin  hexameters 
from  a  drawer  in  his  desk.  He  could  not 
speak  of  agriculture  without  dragging  in  the 
Georgics,  or  of  old  age  without  a  phrase  from 
Cicero,  or  of  love  or  wine  without  a  couplet 
from  Horace.  He  simply  had  to  use  these 
things,  to  say  nothing  of  Praetorian  guards, 
228 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

Pierian  spring,  Parnassus,  Arethusa  and  those 
poor  old  raddled  muses. 

He  and  his  kind  multiplied  like  Australian 
rabbits,  and  it  was  not  till  the  middle  of  the 
last  century  that  English  literature  began  to 
drive  them  out.  Nowadays  we  are  compara 
tively  safe  from  them,  and  no  one  with  any 
natural  spring  of  mind  ekes  out  his  thought 
with  other  people's  phrases.  The  rule  to-day 
is  neither  to  shun  nor  to  seek. 

In  these  days,  if  a  man  have  a  little  Latin 
or  Greek,  the  good  safe  working  rule  is  to  keep 
it  strictly  to  himself,  when  his  native  idiom  will 
serve  as  well,  though  he  is  likely  to  burst  with 
his  happy  secret.  We  stow  these  collegiate 
scraps  away  in  the  back  part  of  our  diction 
aries.  Everyone  knows  where  to  find  them, 
and  nobody  thanks  the  man  who  takes  them 
out.  The  writers  of  a  hundred  or  even  fifty 
years  ago  are  no  guides  for  us  in  this  matter. 
229 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

When  Burke  wrongly  accented  a  Latin  word 
all  Parliament  knew  it,  and  Wyndham  was 
vastly  admired  for  the  enormous  length  of  his 
Latin  quotations.  Now  the  whole  point  of  the 
thing  is  gone.  Were  the  best  of  the  old  writ 
ers  living  now  they  would  never  have  the  air  of 
being  "  echo-haunted  of  many  tongues."  Of 
that  we  may  be  certain.  Even  Thackeray 
would  be  more  sparing  of  his  pallida  mors,  and 
would  sometimes  omit  the  Latin  form  of  his 
"  black  care  behind  the  horseman." 

But  although  we  have  in  the  main  discarded 
inapplicable  Latin  and  Greek,  here  and  there 
the  old  precedent  of  needless  quotation  is  still 
followed,  and  only  the  other  day  I  read  in  a 
newspaper  article,  "If  a  thing  is  right,  it 
ought  to  be  done,  said  Cobden,"  recalling  the 
old  gibe  that  water  is  wet  on  the  authority  of 
Beza.  I  have  noted  the  same  bit  from  a  for 
eign  language  nine  times  in  one  newspaper, 
230 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

and  each  time  could  see  the  paragraph  writh 
ing  to  make  room  for  it.  The  Vicar  of  Wake- 
field's  friend,  with  his  two  stock  phrases  from 
the  classics,  seems  almost  a  burlesque,  but  he 
was  not,  and  he  is  not  even  to-day.  There  are 
men  now  living  who  will  use  a  French  word 
when  there  is  an  exact  English  equivalent,  and 
then  add  the  equivalent  in  parentheses — a  vile 
form  of  ostentation  and  half-hearted  at  that, 
a  sentence  like  a  moustache  with  one  end  waxed 
and  the  other  bushy,  as  if  the  writer  dared  to 
be  only  half-way  foppish.  There  are  wretches 
who  will  quote  you  Pascal  for  the  sentiment 
that  truth  will  prevail.  "  Corrupt  politics  are 
not  good  politics,"  says  Burke,  and  "  Life  is  a 
struggle,"  says  Seneca,  and  "  Dare  to  do 
right,"  says  Cobden,  and  "  Law  is  the  bulwark 
of  liberty,"  as  the  Lord  Chief  Justice  of  Eng 
land  once  remarked.  The  hardened  quoter 
cares  only  for  the  name,  and  perhaps,  when 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

pressed  for  time,  will  forge  it.  That  may  be 
why  one  sees  so  many  dull  sayings  with  great 
names  attached.  But  many,  of  course,  are 
genuine,  and  toilsomely  gathered  for  use  on  the 
day  of  literary  deficit,  when  the  style  needs  a 
ringlet  from  Longfellow,  or  an  orotund  boom 
from  Burke. 

I  find,  for  example,  in  a  recent  number  of 
the  Didactic  Monthly,  a  writer  of  extraordi 
nary  literosity.  In  a  scant  two  pages  I  note 
quotations  from  Disraeli,  John  Morley,  Thiers, 
Condorcet,  Garfield,  Seneca,  Tacitus,  Milton, 
Lincoln,  Thucydides,  President  Harrison,  Cob- 
den,  and  Disraeli  again ;  also  several  illustrative 
literary  anecdotes,  one  Latin  verse,  and  three 
lines  of  a  poem  in  English.  He  ought  not  to 
have  done  it.  It  makes  us  ignorant  persons  en 
vious.  Even  when  we  do  know,  we  must  some 
times  try  and  forget,  for  it  is  cruel  to  be  as 
"  literary  "  as  you  can.  Not  that  I  deny  the 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

apposlteness  of  all  these  literary  allusions,  but 
a  good  many  of  them  served  only  to  show  in 
what  company  the  writer  had  been.  They 
were,  as  you  might  say,  merely  his  literary  cre 
dentials,  and  even  as  such  are  less  convincing 
than  in  the  brave  old  days  when  there  were  no 
Dictionaries  of  Quotation  or  treasuries  of 
prose  or  verse  or  Half  Hours  with  Great  Au 
thors  or  Libraries  of  the  World's  Best  Litera 
ture.  It  is  a  humane  rule  never  to  jingle 
your  literary  pockets  merely  to  tantalise  the 
poor. 

Had  one  a  good  literary  memory  or  a  full 
note-book  (which  can  be  made  to  look  as  well) 
one  might  retort  upon  these  learned  Thebans 
somewhat  in  this  wise:  New  kings  are  strict, 
said  JEschylus  (hapas  de  trachus  hostis  an 
neon  krate),  and  he  might  well  have  said  it  of 
the  newly  learned,  for  they  too  abate  no  jot 
of  their  authorities,  but  approach  all  subjects 
233 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

augustly,  clad  in  the  robes  of  their  predeces 
sors.  And  for  crown  jewels,  they  have  those 
"jewels  five  words  long,"  which  they  never 
weary  of  displaying.  Nor  do  they  forget  that 
Milton's  style  was  "  echo-haunted  of  many 
tongues,"  the  style  for  which  he  became  so 
famous  and  so  shunned.  They  stay  very  close 
to  Milton.  But  they  ignore,  alas,  many  wise 
sayings  even  from  the  time  of  the  Chaldees. 
There  was  Elihu's  warning,  "  Should  a  wise 
man  utter  vain  knowledge  and  fill  his  belly  with 
the  east  wind?"  And  there  was  Quintilian, 
who,  if  I  mistake  not,  implied  that  whoso  would 
seem  learned  to  the  vulgar  seemeth  vulgar  to 
the  wise.  Plato  himself  was  against  them,  de 
fending  not  the  borrowing  of  treasures  merely 
for  display,  but  praising  rather  the  mind's  ac 
tivity  with  its  own  possessions,  and  a  certain 
high  inspired  curiosity,  for,  said  he,  "  a  life 
without  inquiry  (anexetastos  bios)  is  not  livable 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

by  man."  And  from  Plato  we  may  pass  to 
John  P.  Robinson,  of  whom  it  is  perhaps  super 
fluous  to  quote  the  well-known  lines: 

John  P. 

iRobinson,  he 

iSaid  they  didn't  know  everything 

Down  in  Judee. 

Nor  is  that  reading  the  most  fruitful  which 
yields  the  quickest  crop,  particularly  if  it  be 
only  a  crop  of  quotations,  for  that  is  like  dig 
ging  up  your  seed  potatoes.  A  mind  planted 
with  the  world's  best  authors  must  still  wait  for 
its  own  thoughts  to  grow,  for,  as  Cicero  said, 
all  the  arts  have  a  common  element  (quoddam 
commune  vinculum),  and  it  is  as  true  of  letters 
as  of  agriculture  that,  as  Sir  Thomas  Brown 
has  somewhere  tersely  put  it,  "All  celerity 
should  be  contempered  by  cunctation."  Scraps 
from  a  great  man's  writings  are  no  sign  of  a 
sense  of  greatness,  but  many  quote  them  as 
235 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

clear  proof  that  they  have  seen  Behemoth  and 
"  played  with  him  as  with  a  bird."  As  Con 
fucius  said  to  Julius  Cassar,  "  Be  to  thine  own 
self  true,"  and  this  implies  that  you  have  a 
self,  a  poor  thing,  but  thine  own,  submerged 
by  other  people's  words,  but  still  sentient,  a 
pale  survivor  of  ten  thousand  tags  and  hack- 
neyisms  like  these  which  I  have  used.  Some 
thing  off  your  own  bat  (to  use  a  coarse  post- 
classic  figure)  is  wanted  now  and  then.  One 
learns  little  more  about  a  man  from  the  feats 
of  his  literary  memory  than  from  the  feats  of 
his  alimentary  canal. 

When  young  and  helpless  I  once  fell  into  a 
family  that  lived  by  the  bad  old  rule.  They 
made  it  a  daily  duty  to  study  up  things  to 
quote,  and  every  Sunday  morning  at  breakfast 
each  would  recite  a  passage  memorised  during 
the  week.  The  steam  from  the  coffee  vanished 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

into  literary  air,  and  the  muffins,  by  the  time 
we  got  to  them,  seemed  to  be  bound  in  calf. 
They  said  it  helped  to  fix  the  thing  in  mind, 
and  though  they  had  no  present  use  for  it, 
they  thought  something  might  happen  that  it 
would  seem  to  fit.  And  they  saw  to  it  that 
something  did  happen,  and  out  it  came  to  the 
end.  They  lived  in  a  sort  of  vicious  watchful 
ness.  On  wet  days  they  conned  over  their  rain 
verse  in  order  to  whip  out  a  stanza  in  the  midst 
of  weather  talk,  and  if  they  drove  through  the 
country  they  saw  nothing  for  constantly 
mumbling  what  Wordsworth  would  have  said. 
They  would  say  the  passage  was  doubtless  fa 
miliar,  but  relentlessly  repeat  every  word. 
Large  blocks  of  poetry  would  suddenly  fall 
athwart  the  conversation,  no  one  knew  whence, 
while  with  bowed  head  the  startled  Philistine 
would  wait  for  the  seizure  to  pass.  There  was 
237 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

nothing  in  that  family  that  you  could  not 
somewhere  read,  and  the  people  who  once  knew 
them,  now  either  visit  a  library  or  turn  to  an 
album  of  song.  To  be  sure  it  was  somewhat 
unusual,  but  it  shows  there  is  life  in  the  old 
temptation,  and  what  havoc  it  still  may  work. 


OCCASIONAL    VERSE 


XI 

OCCASIONAL     VERSE 

THEY  say  the  modern  man  does  not  read 
poetry.  I  have  read  many  essays  on  the 
growing  dislike  for  it,  and  I  remember  particu 
larly  one  very  sad  interview  with  a  London 
publisher  which  appeared  in  a  British  period 
ical  under  the  appropriate  caption,  "  The 
Slump  in  Verse."  I  recall,  too,  some  lines  in 
Punch  written  at  that  time,  telling  us  that  the 
case  was  hopeless — 

For  men  in  these  expansive  times 
(Due,  I  am  told,  to  fiscal  freedom), 

Though  earth  were  black  with  angels'  rhymes, 
Dine  far  too  well  to  want  to  read  'em. 

Yet  looking  back  on  the  past  decade  I  can 
not  escape  the  conviction  that  it  has  been  one 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

of  extraordinary  prosodical  activity.  Occa 
sional  verse  has  never  been  so  abundant  or  so 
prompt,  for  poets  nowadays  are  great  readers 
of  the  newspapers,  especially  of  the  headlines, 
and  trained  to  sing  before  the  report  is  con 
tradicted,  almost  between  successive  editions. 

Now  I,  who  never  drank  of  Aganippe  well, 
nor  ever  did  in  Vale  of  Tempe  sit,  may  not 
speak  with  authority  in  these  deep  matters, 
but  as  a  warm-hearted  fellow-being,  anxious  to 
see  every  poet,  great  or  small,  put  his  best  foot 
foremost,  I  may  venture  to  remind  them  of 
the  notoriously  small  proportion  of  occasional 
verse  that  has  ever  succeeded  in  rising  to  the 
occasion.  This  is  the  more  needful  because 
when  a  poet  goes  wrong  he  is  forgotten,  and 
so  the  warning  is  lost.  The  fugitive  poet  al 
most  invariably  makes  his  escape,  which  is  not 
a  wholesome  example.  I  recall  several  poetical 
occasions  of  the  last  ten  years,  unjustly  for- 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

gotten  by  everybody  else,  for  they  deserve  re 
membrance  for  the  damage  that  was  done. 

In  the  first  place  there  was  the  South  Afri 
can  war.  It  was  not  in  South  Africa  alone 
that  Englishmen  were  called  upon  to  face  the 
horrors  of  that  war.  The  kind  of  verses  that 
were  cabled  to  us  from  England  every  few 
days  appealed  almost  as  strongly  to  our  sym 
pathies  as  the  reports  of  casualties  from  the 
front.  One  after  another  the  leading  poets  of 
England  tried  and  failed.  One  group  of 
them  clinging  to  classic  models,  achieved  only 
alliteration  and  Homeric  metaphors.  These 
were  not  content  till  they  had  employed  the 
expression  "Afric'e  shores."  Others,  mad 
after  colloquialism,  were  impelled  by  their 
strictly  democratic  conscience  to  use  the  word 
"  bloomin'  "  in  every  fourth  line.  Of  the  two, 
the  "  bloomin' "  ballad  was  preferable  because 
less  pretentious,  less  like  a  deliberate  assault 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

upon  the  muse,  and  when  it  was  a  frank  ap 
peal  for  subscriptions  to  some  charity,  it  may 
have  been  justified  by  the  pecuniary  results.  It 
was  bad  enough,  however,  and  the  "Afric's 
shore  "  things  were  quite  unpardonable.  When 
England  reckoned  up  her  victories  she  had  as 
offset  several  scores  of  punctured  poets  that 
never  again  could  be  quite  what  they  once  were 
to  the  public. 

And  in  France  there  were  Rostand's  lines  on 
poor  old  President  Kriiger.  "  No,"  sang  the 
poet,  "history  has -nothing  in  her  cycles  finer 
or  more  tragic  than  the  spectacle  of  this  old 
man  in  eyeglasses  with  crepe  on  his  hat " — a 
bald  rendering  of  the  French  verse,  I  admit, 
but  it  deserves  no  better.  Some  one  commented 
on  it  rather  sadly  at  the  time  as  proof  of  "  a 
faltering  pen  and  laboured  inspiration,"  which, 
of  course,  was  most  unjust  as  applied  to 
merely  occasional  verse.  It  was  as  good  as  most 
244 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

of  it.  Setting  the  news  of  the  day  to  music 
is  a  hard  task,  and  the  best  of  poets  need  a 
piano-tuner  if  you  insist  on  banging  out  an 
accompaniment  on  them  to  every  press  de 
spatch.  And  besides  there  were  some  swift 
readers  in  that  day  who  no  doubt  found  much 
beauty  in  that  line,  A'uec  ce  crepe  a  son  cha~ 
peau!  He  would  have  been  asked  to  read  it 
at  an  authors'  meeting  in  this  country,  and 

friends     might     have     crowded     around     and 

^ 

grasped  his  soft,  moist  hand,  and  told  him  it 
was  the  best  thing  he  had  ever  done;  and 
within  two  weeks  he  might  have  been  lecturing 
on  it  before  the  Burial  Society  and  squaring 
it  with  world  politics  at  the  Kansas  Woman's 
Club. 

For  who  are  we  that  we  should  revile  these 
efforts  of  the  foreigner?     To  be  sure  during 
the  war  with  Spain  our  bards  were  more  for 
bearing    and    we    were    singularly    free    from 
245 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

martial  poetry  of  this  class.  Yet  we  had  poets 
who  put  up  pumping  stations  at  the  Pierian 
Spring,  poets  who  supplied  the  public  dinner 
table,  who,  no  matter  what  the  public  occasion, 
had  as  fixed  a  place  at  it  as  music  by  the  band, 
stem-winding  poets  ever  ready  to  "read  some 
little  thing,"  bards  of  a  strange  and  passion 
ate  promptness,  surprised  may  be,  yet  turning 
quickly  on  the  tormentor  and  ripping  out  an 
ode.  And  of  all  the  odes  that  ever  burst 
punctually  from  a  poet's  heart  on  the  morn 
ings  of  anniversaries,  odes  on  unveilings,  flag- 
hoistings  and  layings  of  corner-stones,  odes  on 
first  shovelfuls  and  final  bricks,  odes  obituary, 
natal,  royal-matrimonial,  sesqui-centennial, 
and  millenary,  this  country  has  undoubtedly 
produced  odes  the  most  perfectly  occasional, 
odes  the  most  utterly  commemorative. 

As  soon  as  the  report  of  the  St.  Petersburg 
massacre  reached  England  and  America,  most 
of  the  small  poets  and  one  or  two  of  the  larger 
246 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ones  set  vigorously  to  work,  and  in  an  almost 
incredibly  short  time  the  mails  were  full  of 
poems  on  the  Czar.  It  was  not  my  fortune  to 
see  many  of  them,  but  from  such  as  happened 
my  way  and  from  the  reports  of  readers  who 
occupied  a  more  exposed  position,  I  inferred 
that  either  the  later  ones  were  all  modelled  on 
the  first  or  that  by  a  marvellous  coincidence 
forty  independent  inspirations  hit  on  the  self 
same  words.  So  embarrassing  was  the  situa 
tion  that  one  newspaper  announced  that  it 
could  not  publish  any  more  poetical  rebukes 
of  the  Czar  except  on  the  impossible  condition 
that  they  contained  thoughts  not  presented  in 
those  already  printed;  and  it  decided  in  ad 
vance  against  any  poem  that  should  turn  on 
the  incongruity  between  the  Czar's  title  of 
"Little  Father"  and  his  unpaternal  conduct 
toward  his  people.  It  seemed  that  twenty 
poets  a  day  were  discovering  that  incongruity. 
And  since  this  has  happened  many  times 
247 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

these  past  ten  years,  if  indeed  something  like  it 
has  not  been  constantly  going  on,  it  seems 
as  if  the  thousand  men  and  women  now 
engaged  on  songs  appropriate  to  the  press  de 
spatches  should  somehow  be  reminded  of  the 
simple  truth.  For  despite  many  conspicuous  ex 
ceptions  it  is  well  known  that  even  great  poets 
have  always  done  their  worst  when  keeping  these 
public  engagements.  Banquets,  birthdays,  cor 
onations,  bicentennials,  news  from  the  seat 
of  war,  the  laying  of  corner-stones,  earth 
quakes,  assassinations,  the  return  of  heroes,  the 
thousand  and  one  obviously  poetic  exigencies 
of  the  day,  have  been  sung  in  the  lays  that  are 
hardest  to  remember.  Poets  are  by  nature  un- 
punctual  and  perverse  and  of  the  least  use 
when  in  the  greatest  hurry  to  make  themselves 
useful.  It  has  been  proved  that  the  best  poems 
are  those  which  we  did  not  know  were  wanted 
and  that  the  worst  are  those  which  are  deliv- 
248 


CONSTRAINED     ATTITUDES 

ered  on  demand ;  and  that  occasional  verse,  be 
ing  of  the  latter  description,  merely  darkens  a 
little  the  day  or  the  deed,  or  the  lady's  album 
that  called  it  forth.  Where  genius  has  so 
often  failed,  it  seems  as  if  our  milder,  modern 
bards  might  observe  more  prudence,  and  await 
more  patiently  the  birth  of  song,  realising 
that  it  is  given  to  few  poets  to  take  time  by 
the  forelock,  or  make  hay  while  the  sun  shines, 
•or  strike  while  the  iron  is  hot — adages  not 
meant  for  bards  but  for  farmers,  steamfitters 
and  us  old  prosers,  who  are  as  inspired  to-day 
as  we  ever  shall  be  and  stand  no  chance  of  a 
tuneful  impulse  if  we  wait  for  ever  so  long. 


249 


V 


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